T O M B I S S E L L .
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Biography
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University (where he coedited MSU's literary magazine, The Red Cedar Review), he taught English in Uzbekistan and then worked as a book editor in New York City. Among his editorial endeavors were the restoration to print of Paula Fox's novels; conceiving and editing The Collected Stories of Richard Yates; conceiving A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on Twenty-Five Years of Star Wars; and working with young novelists such as John Beckman, Robert Gatewood, and Gary Sernovitz. He often writes for national publications of various stripes, on topics ranging from geopolitics to video games to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and when encapsulating all of this is sometimes forced to refer to himself in the third person, for which he does not much care. He has published or will soon publish in Agni, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, Best American Travel Writing 2003, BOMB, The Boston Review, Esquire, GQ, Granta, Harper's, McSweeney's, Men's Journal, Salon, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His first book, Chasing the Sea, was published in 2003, followed shortly thereafter by Speak, Commentary, a humor book published by McSweeney's that he coauthored with Jeff Alexander. He lives in New York City.
His short-story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories was published by Pantheon in January 2005. He is currently writing a travel narrative about a trip to Vietnam he took with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War, which will also be published at some point by Pantheon. Someday soon he will write another novel that, unlike his earlier novels, he hopes will be published.
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Books
God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories (Pantheon, January 2005)
Chasing the Sea (Pantheon, 2003)
Wild East, contributor (Justin Charles, 2003)
Best American Travel Writing 2003, contributor (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
Speak, Commentary, with Jeff Alexander (McSweeney's, 2003)
A Galaxy Not So Far Away, contributor (Holt, 2002)
The Bellybutton Fiasco, with Webster Younce (Xlibris, 2001)
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Press and Interviews
October 2003
Newsday (New York)
The Accidental Ecotourist, An aspiring fiction writer finds himself trekking to a disappearing sea in Uzbekistan
By Peter Terzian
"In the mid-'90s, the Peace Corps assigned him to Uzbekistan, but after seven months, he suffered an emotional collapse, part culture shock, part relationship troubles back home. He returned to the United States, but a fascination with Central Asia persisted; he began to write short stories set in the region..."
October 2003
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin)
Review: Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
By John Freeman
"In Chasing the Sea, a fantastic memoir of traveling through the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Tom Bissell proves he is a maestro of the genre at age 29. Read this book and it will be difficult to imagine not traipsing after him wherever he may go."
October 2003
The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
Review: Chasing the Sea
Chasing the shrinking presence of the Aral Sea: Stories capture the
entrancing region of Uzbekistan and the Karakalpak people
"'When writing, I tried to keep whatever I learned very light — stories less within the anthropological tradition and more within the tradition of, say, Typee, which was written by [Herman] Melville after spending four weeks among his Polynesian subjects, although he claimed it was four months,' he writes."
September 29, 2003
The New Yorker
Review: Chasing the Sea
THE CRITICS; Briefly Noted
"Bissell shines as a raconteur, if not as an analyst, and his ebullient narrative harks back to the travel classics of the nineteenth century, when the journey was an end in itself."
August 2003
The Economist
Review: Chasing the Sea
An American abroad
Author unknown
"Mr. Bissell seamlessly weaves in historical insights and cultural references, making his tale a well-rounded snapshot of Uzbekistan, seen from western eyes."
2003
Peacecorpswriters.org
Interview
By John Coyne
"The truth is, as a small-town Midwestern boy, the idea of travel always vaguely terrified me. A big city—like, say, Milwaukee—just unnerved me. I felt so dwarfed and frightened, and I hated that feeling. I realized early on that if I was ever going to get over this strange fear I had to confront it head on. I figured the Peace Corps would give me a chance to not only confront my fears but annihilate them for once and all."
Student Traveler Magazine
Dude, Where's My Uzbekistan?
"I knew virtually nothing about it when I first went there. I like that sense of being one of the few Western people who have
experienced that part of the world—everything seems very fresh to me as a writer there. I feel like I'm bringing back something very
new, not just to readers but to myself."
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Author Photo
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Photo by Greg Martin
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