Tom Bissell is a multi-genre writer (Extra Lives, God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories), but his essays are especially good, and the collection in Magic Hours proves that like John McPhee or John Updike, a good writer can even dazzle by describing how to light a match. If, as he quotes Matthew Arnold, journalism (which these essays are) is "literature in a hurry," Bissell can run fast, very fast.
Bissell takes on a wide variety of subjects under the general heading of creation; all his efforts are entertaining, informative and exquisitely readable. He takes us to the set of the TV sitcom Mike and Molly and introduces us to its successful producer, Chuck Lorre. "Sitcoms," Bissell writes, "if they show us anything, show us people we might like to know." It's a medium designed to reassure. Then he visits his Upper Michigan home town, where the movie Escanaba in da Moonlight is being made, and riffs beautifully on small-town America. He also visits a director who just keeps on making "frustrating, beautiful, always mesmerizingly strange" films, the "Updike of contemporary cinema"--Werner Herzog. From a piece on the voiceover queen for the popular video game Mass Effect 3 to a penetrating essay on documentary films about Iraq ("partial maps drawn while still within the maze of war") to a touching portrait of writer/friend Jim Harrison, Bissell proves over and over that, like Harrison, he, too, can write "like a force of nature." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher