Stylistically, Scanlan’s sentences are as clipped, elliptical, and lyrical as those in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. And I do consider them Scanlan’s sentences, though not hers alone. Some credit for the concision goes to the diarist herself ... Aug 9—Fog is brimming with the authentic boredom of actual life ... There’s an underlying gratitude throughout Aug 9—Fog: the diarist’s gratitude for D. and snow...and Scanlan’s gratitude for the accident of the diary’s acquisition. Like most sincere expressions of thanks, this novel is notable for its straight-shooting anti-sentimentality. The writing celebrates life without becoming self-indulgent; for all its praise of dismissable minutiae, Aug 9—Fog remains disciplined, and never enumerates life’s small pleasures in the hopes of fluffing up the page-count. It feels like Wittgenstein edited Knausgaard ... Aug 9—Fog is brilliant and ordinary, rife with life’s ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters, the sort of book you need to reread and want to memorize—a morsel you can savor forever, like how you wish life could be.

Scanlan has created something truly unique ... stands as a radical celebration of the moment, the most intimate and personal, made universal. The opacity of its entries helps to convey unique meanings to each reader. For those that find the sentences resonant, the book serves as an artifact to return to over time, feel inspired by, or simply re-frame a way of thinking ... The writing style is sparse, more often than not grammatically incorrect, but deeply evocative in its minimalism ... The writing is poetic, so sparse to be abstract ... Scanlan’s work in curation, arrangement, and construction of the entries is marvelous. She’s managed to find the perfect balance between maintaining enough of a through-line to suggest continuity, while removing enough to give space for the reader’s imagination. It’s at once a work of addition and subtraction, a masterclass in composition ... nuance just below the surface only leads each page to stand stronger by itself, and as a whole. I suspect not everyone will fall in love with Aug 9 – Fog, but those that do will be discovering a book that lingers long after reading.

... short and sweet — to be read in one afternoon, then reread many afternoons over ... I was reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in the effortless way Scanlan glazes the mundane with meaning ... There are certain works of poetry or prose that carry such an irresistible mouthfeel that I have to whisper along with the words as I read them, and this book offers a perfect example. The abbreviated voice of the diary’s author does not elaborate for the sake of explanation or grammar, and begins to give the impression of a lovably stylized character. Her words are almost childlike in their simple colloquialism, proving irresistibly relatable ... Scanlan’s arrangement of the author’s words render a tender and human portrait of old age, relating daily experiences of illness, hobbies, care from family members, and loneliness. One of the book’s most salient themes is the physical body and the fragility of its health ... fascinating, particularly to young writers still making sense of form and genre, since Scanlan’s authorship is editorial: the words are not her own, and yet the book and its plot are her artistic creation. Her prose pursues an object of fascination and presents it with the language most fitting, regardless of convention.

Aug 9—Fog ... [is] deeply personal while at the same time keeping us at arm’s length...circular but also move[s] through time ... Aug 9—Fog operates as a...reflective surface—by turns, long distance and internalized. Its blurriness is less that of a single self than between two selves; the original (and, to us, anonymous) diarist and Scanlan as she rewrites a set of pathways through this other life ... 'Sun shining then rainy but clearing,' Scanlan ends her version of the diary. And in those six unpunctuated words, the entire history of human perseverance is revealed.

Tipping between speculations on Ms. Scanlan’s process (including building our trust that her work is not a literary hoax, but really is based on a found diary) and immersion in Mrs. Lacy’s life makes reading Fog fascinating and pleasurable ... At times I resented reading Mrs. Lacy’s diary through Ms. Scanlan’s deceptively simple, actually intricate, moucharabieh screen. I had a naive urge to get to the 'real' Mrs. Lacy ... Some entries puzzled me, maybe due to regional quirks and, again, the generational difference ... They suffice, Ms. Scanlan’s selections, to build a world ... Whatever images a reader creates from details implied but never stated in Aug 9—Fog, the feeling of the woman’s life touches its pages. Not a generic 'old woman' life, yet somehow universal ... However artfully chosen and ordered its pieces are, Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9—Fog is no more a revelation of a specific private life than a handful of pottery shards is a revelation of a lost village. It comprises fragments of a woman’s life that another woman constructed into a literary work. Its contrivance makes it no less 'authentic.'

In fleeting, diary-esque entries sectioned by season, Scanlan writes in a new vernacular resulting from the commingling, an unusual 'co-authoring' that holds multiple layers of mystery. Where the diarist's nonfiction and Scanlan's fiction meet or marry is unknown—somewhat frustratingly unknowable in the most intriguing of ways. The 'story' is by turns clear and vague. Day-in-the-life details (weather changes, church-going, pie-making, visiting) and profound life and death events paint a full spectrum over the course of time. Guesses can be made as to the identities of recurring characters 'Vern' and 'D.,' but the varying forms and linguistic style is both provoking and devilishly satisfying. Aug 9—Fog is a one-sitting read that echoes long after the final 'Winter' has passed.

Scanlan’s outstanding debut inventively adapts a real woman’s diary ... The book is a fascinating chronicle of Scanlan’s obsession, but, more than that, it transforms a seemingly ordinary life into a profound and moving depiction of how humans can love and live. Scanlan’s portrait of an everywoman feels entirely new.

There is an undeniable poignancy in the readerly act of filling in the gaps of this octogenarian's life, her voice pulled into the present from where it had been suspended in the late 1960s/early '70s ... the text offers pleasures that the context complicates. A work of frequent beauty but puzzling intent.