Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged, and rearranged the diarists’ words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog.

Originally published in 2019, this is the first UK edition, now available to pre-order.

Kathryn Scanlan is the author, also, of The Dominant Animal and Kick the Latch. Originally from Iowa, she lives in Los Angeles. More here.

Praise for Aug 9 – Fog:

“I’ve never come across anything quite like it since, and don’t believe I ever will.” – Magali Reus

“In Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 – Fog, a notebook deteriorates beneath a ‘big red sun’, emanating a succession of moments and scenes that ‘tingle’, ‘glimmer’, and fail. This is the drenched Diary, crumbling when opened, a collection of ‘loose scrap notes’. ‘To read the diary is to be dropped into a life’, writes Scanlan, magnetising sentences into loose, strangely tender shapes. Is a paragraph a kind of chrysalis? The fog is burning off. We read towards that.” – Bhanu Kapil

“…in this unusual, finely judged and wrought work, [Kathryn Scanlan] has created beautifully resonant lines of what amounts to prose poetry out of the found diaries of an elderly stranger and in doing so has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.” – Lydia Davis

“These Scanlan passages of life – you should take them with you wherever you go.” – Vi Khi Nao, author of Sheep Machine

“Elegant and unpretentious . . . [Aug 9 – Fog] grants every reader that simultaneous pull between mystery and intimacy . . . these barest clues—of new lights installed and tomatoes canned, tombstones bought and weeds tormented, a self-help book with a photograph from decades before tucked inside – are the ones that make us fall in love. – Nadja Spiegelman, The Paris Review

Through The Tinnitus explores spatial and sonic phenomena through psychoacoustics—the scientific study of how sound is perceived psychologically. Using a version of the pioneering Soviet-designed ANS photo-optical synthesiser, images taken in the artist’s locale, the Jamhuri and Sabaki Neighborhoods of Nairobi, are processed and converted into graphical or drawn sound. In the sound work accompanying the book, these ekphrastic rhythms hum to the sonic backdrop of political violence and utopian dreams.

A free download code for the album will be provided on purchase of the book.

Kamwangi Njue is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and experimental beatmaker from Nairobi, Kenya.

Through The Tinnitus is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

Then there was the sculpture, a large lustrous black stone of alien provenance. Walking around it I realised that the sculpture had been placed so that upon entering one might see only its black surface. On the other side it revealed a surface open and coated in gold glitter, geodic revelation. I knelt to inspect it closer, witness to a tiny spider crawling across its surface, from black to gold and back.

Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index takes the concept of the ‘ideal black body’ as its guiding object. In thermodynamics and physics, the ideal black body is a theoretical object that absorbs and emits all incident radiation. No such object exists, though a few come close…

Told in a mercurial constellation of fragments that move between memoir, poetry and thermodynamic theory, Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index inspects the ‘thingification’ of an ideal black life and refutes it—insisting on the freedom to live beyond the demands of an enforced objecthood.

Black Body Index is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. He occasionally writes things when not tending to his bookstore, Taylor & Co. Books, in the Ditmas Park neighbourhood of Brooklyn.