Kathryn Scanlan’s Violent Compression

Scanlan’s books are hard to slot into traditional genre categories. Her début, “Aug 9-Fog,” which appeared in 2019, consists of fragments whittled from a diary that Scanlan found at an estate sale. It recounts a year in the life of an eighty-six-year-old woman in rural Illinois, seasons spent tending a home and nursing a dying husband: “He called. Not so good. Bleeding again. Trying to knit pincushion.” The next year, Scanlan published a collection, “The Dominant Animal,” that shrank the short story to its barest bones: forty stories in just a hundred and forty pages.