Tom Bissell

Biography

Tom Bissell is the author of a collection of short stories God Lives in St. Petersburg (Pantheon, 2005), winner of the Rome Prize, and two travel narratives: Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (Pantheon, 2003), cited by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the 86 best travel books of all time; and The Father of All Things (Pantheon, 2007), selected as one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is working on a travel book about the tombs of the Twelve Apostles.

See Work

ESSAYS / Summer 2009

Looking for Judas

By Tom Bissell

We had been looking for Hakeldama for close to an hour, wandering through deep, desertic, geological gouges stubbled with little merkins of shrubbery and low gray trees that look squashed and drained of chlorophyll. The sun did strange...
FICTION / Spring 2008

My Interview with the Avenger

By Tom Bissell ,  Illustrations by Gary Panter

This is a story about heroes. Yes, it is also a profile of a famous man, a “celebrity,” I suppose, but it is first and foremost a story about heroes, what they mean, and the draperies of significance with which we decorate them. The hero in...

Loch Ness Memoir

By Tom Bissell
CRITICISM / Summer 2006

Euphorias of Perrier: The Case Against Robert D. Kaplan

By Tom Bissell

How to deal with this fractious world is Kaplan’s great question. Some years ago, he has written, after a conference where “intellectuals held forth about the moral responsibility of the United States in the Balkans,” he took a cab back to...

ESSAYS / Summer 2005

A Polar Turn of Mind: Finding Peace and Quiet in the High Canadian Arctic

By Tom Bissell

or most North Americans travel means moving sideways or, slightly more exotically, south. The former journey unwires one’s circadian rhythm while the latter equinoctially scrambles the night sky. What of going North, then? As it turns out...

FICTION / Summer 2004

Death Defier

By Tom Bissell

Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks. The wheel, as though excited by its sudden...