Tom Bissell

Bissell's story "Expensive Trips Nowhere" was filmed as The Loneliest Planet (2011).

While much of Bissell's writing is concerned with issues of international relations and literary criticism, he frequently references Star Wars, J.R.R. Tolkien, and video games as well. The video game Gears of War 2, the first version of which Bissell wrote about for The New Yorker, contains a character named Hank Bissell, an apparent nod to him. In a March 2010 Observer article, he wrote about the appeal of games like Grand Theft Auto IV and his own simultaneous struggles with addiction to video games and cocaine.

Bissell wrote about the cult film The Room in a 2010 article ("Cinema Crudité") published in Harper's Magazine. In May 2011, he signed on to co-write (with actor Greg Sestero) a closer look at the film – the resultant book, The Disaster Artist, was published by Simon and Schuster in October 2013.

In 2005, Pantheon published a collection of Bissell's short fiction, God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories. In the same year, his story "Death Defier" was published in the Best American Short Stories. His story "Aral" inspired Werner Herzog's 2016 film Salt and Fire.

He studied English at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. In 1996, when he was 22 years old, Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. He was there for seven months before returning home. He worked as a book editor in New York City and edited, among other books, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates and Paula Fox's memoir Borrowed Finery. He is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.

Tom Bissell (born January 9, 1974) is an American journalist, critic, and fiction writer.