Tom Bissell

Biography

Tom Bissell is the author of eleven books, the most recent of which is Creative Types: and Other Stories (Pantheon, 2021). As a screenwriter, he cocreated The Mosquito Coast, based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, for Apple TV+ and wrote three episodes for the second and final season of Andor: A Star Wars Story for Disney+. His piece in this issue, “Awe and Splendor,” is drawn from his forthcoming book Well Adapted: Confessions of an Accidental Screenwriter. He has been a contributing editor to VQR for over twenty years.

Tom Bissell Photo
Eugene Byrd

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...