Divided Mind

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee offers praise for Divided Mind, a new collection of work by the essayist and critic George Scialabba:

[I]t is about time someone brought out a collection of Scialabba’s work. That it’s only happening now (15 years after the National Book Critics Circle gave him its first award for excellence in reviewing) is a sign that things are not quite right in the world of belles lettres. He writes in what William Hazlitt—the patron saint of generalist essayists—called the “the familiar style,” and he is sometimes disarmingly explicit about the difficulties, even the pain, he experiences in trying to resolve cultural contradictions. That is no way to create the aura of mystery and mastery so crucial for awesome intellectual authority… . Somewhere in my study is a hefty folder containing, if not George Scialabba’s complete oeuvre, then at least the bulk of it. After several years of reading and admiring his essays, I can testify that Divided Mind is a well-edited selection covering many of his abiding concerns. It ought to be interest to anyone interested in the “fourth genre,” as the essay is sometimes called.