Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox's work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper's , these essays represent ten years of Bissell's best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter. What are sitcoms for exactly? Can art be both bad and genius? Why do some books survive and others vanish? Bissell's exploration of these questions make for gripping, unforgettable reading. "[Tom Bissell] writes these essays with a storyteller’s eye for detail." — New York Times Book Review "Bissell writes astutely, smartly, and with acerbic candor." — The Boston Globe "A highly gratifying literary experience." — Los Angeles Review of Books "Sharply observed, lushly descriptive and often extremely funny." — Salon "Elating." — Guernica “Tom Bissell is at his best in this terrific collection.” — Geoff Dyer "Every one of Bissell's pieces is like some great, transfixing documentary you stumble on while channel-surfing late at night—something you feel, in that moment, a kind of gratitude toward for redeeming your sleeplessness. Considered alongside his fiction, this new collection makes clear that Tom Bissell is one of our most interesting and ambitious writers." — John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of  Pulphead "Bissell ( Extra Lives ) peels back the layers of what it means to create and the toll creation often takes on its practitioners.... 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." — Publisher's Weekly  (Starred Review) "A whip-smart, occasionally pugnacious collection of essays on culture from a wide-ranging critic....Bissell can tear into his subjects with a ferocity and brutal wit that recalls Dwight Macdonald...Stellar cultural writing—Bissell has the knowledge and wit to earn his provocations." — Kirkus  (Starred Review) "Bissell’s essays are brutally honest, thoughtful and entertaining to the nth degree." — Portland Book Review "Entertaining, informative and exquisitely readable." — Shelf Awareness "Full of beauty." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer TOM BISSELL is the author of nine books, most recently  Apostle,  and has been awarded the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He writes frequently for  Harper’s Magazine  and  The New Yorker. Symbolic Value: On Martin Amis’s The Second Plane   Martin Amis’s The Second Plane is a collection of essays, short fiction, and book reviews arranged in order of composition. It thus functions, in some ways, as a walking tour of the motley post-September 11 mind--its fears, madnesses, misapprehensions, and insights. While the book’s first essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, aches with the same “reflexive search for the morally intelligible” (as Amis elsewhere calls it) that animates the desperate relativism of the paleo-left, the end of the book finds him, having now enlightened himself on modern Islam’s intellectual traffic jam, condemning the very same left’s “hemispherical abjection” to the “Thanatism” of radical Islam. The author of several of the funniest novels ever written, and arguably the world’s most entertaining writer of prose, Martin Amis has also periodically examined some colossal human bummers and published his findings in what are typically slim but rigorous volumes. Predictably, the Amis of this mode has his detractors. Einstein’s Monsters (1987), with its forceful denunciation of nuclear weaponry, was slighted as little more than an empty declaration of seriousness. (It wasn’t.) More recently, Koba the Dread (2002), a historical sleigh ride through the left’s collaborations with Stalinism, rolled many eyes with its supposedly needless revisitings. (They weren’t.) Yet these books were, in some ways, vulnerable to belittling encapsulation. So is The Second Plane , which might be called a psychic survey of our terror-haunted terrain--the smoking fumaroles, flash-flood magma flows, and exploding horizons. Some of its sentiment (“the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked”) is coarsely put, and some of its broader arguments undoubtedly wrong. Like its predecessors, then, it, too, will be ridiculed--but not by any reader who has attempted to read it or Amis carefully. The centerpiece is a long essay here titled “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind.” (When it appeared in the Guardian in September 2006, the title was “The Age of Hor