Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

In essays spanning a decade, many previously published in Harper’s and the Believer, Bissell (Extra Lives) peels back the layers of what it means to create and the toll creation often takes on its practitioners. While writers and writing are by no means his only subjects, Bissell is particularly astute when it comes to the arbitrary nature of literary fame. In “Unflowered Aloes” and “Grief and the Outsider,” he considers the longevity of literary fame, and of works by the likes of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville that originally met with withering scorn. Bissell turns to the screen—and his tiny hometown of Escanaba, Mich.—in “Escanaba’s Magic Hour,” narrating both the evolution of a film shoot by “Movie People” (as outsiders, a common theme in the collection) and Bissell’s own relationship with the town of his birth. Documentary film is explored in “Rules of Engagement,” where the act of creating a compelling story—here documentaries depicting the Iraq war—is an exercise in both truth and fiction. Never pedantic or self-congratulatory, Bissell says that he never set out to write nonfiction, and perhaps it’s this backdoor approach that makes his observations on craft and the many avenues that lead to the written word all the more powerful. Agent: Heather Schroder, ICM. (Apr.)