You could say that Tom Bissell, author of the superb new collection of short stories, “God Lives in Saint Petersburg” (Pantheon, 212 pages, $20) is the son of a banker in Escanaba, Mich. Not necessarily a promising entree into the American literary world. But, how many small-town bankers are friends with two well-known American novelists? The novelists were Philip Caputo and Jim Harrison, and Mr. Caputo ended up becoming Mr. Bissell’s literary mentor.

“I showed my first stuff to Phil, and Phil was always, like, ‘Yeah, it’s … nice,” Mr. Bissell said, laughing off his first efforts. “But I just kept at it, you know? I remember the first time I showed him something where he sat me down and said, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but you should really keep this up.’ I was 16, 17. And that was one of the biggest deals of my life.”

Now 31, Mr. Bissell has amply justified his mentor’s faith in him. He’s also captured the attention of his literary contemporaries. Dave Eggers is on record saying “There’s no more gifted and exciting young writer in America than Tom Bissell,” and since the two men have only met twice and exchanged perhaps four e-mails, it’s likely that this is more than just book-world back-scratching. Mr. Bissell is richly talented, and there is a pugnacity to his blunt-featured face that suggests he is determined to make the most of his talent.

“I have become a writer greatly interested in sites of human suffering,” he announced in an essay about the Vietnam War (the subject of a future book) published last December in Harper’s. Both the ambition and the suffering are evident in “God Lives in Saint Petersburg.” All but one of the new stories are set in Central Asia, and they are peopled by young Americans coming unstuck in alien, sometimes hostile, landscapes. The title story won the Pushcart Prize, and his tales of hapless Americans abroad have led critics to dust off names like Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Bowles.

The longest story in the collection, “Death Defier,” is set in Afghanistan during the American invasion of November, 2001. Donk, a naive photojournalist for whom the prospect of death is like a television show “he knew was on channel 11 at eight o’clock but had never watched and never planned to,” finds himself stranded in northern Afghanistan with a Robert Fisk-like British journalist who quotes Shakespeare and makes snarky anti-American comments even as he is succumbing to the ravages of malaria.

In “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” an encounter with bandits in Kazakhstan leads to a moment of devastating psychological emasculation for a dilettante traveler from New York. The story strongly evokes the sunlit nightmares of Paul Bowles, but Mr. Bissell says it is in fact a direct rewrite of Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” He points out that a recent Dave Eggers story, “Up the Mountain, Coming Down Slowly,” is “a brilliant gloss” on Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Since Hemingway is scorned by today’s literati as a macho buffoon, Mr. Bissell can only surmise that this coincidental interest in his work is the result of youthful American writers going back out into the world, in the way of Hemingway himself. What has changed since Hemingway’s day is where young American writers go, with many choosing countries from the former Soviet bloc.

Mr. Bissell went to Uzbekistan, first as a Peace Corps volunteer at the age of 23, and later as a writer with a book in mind. The resulting volume, “Chasing the Sea,” published in 2003, won him critical raves. “Bissell is a born raconteur but he is also a prodigious scholar,” wrote a reviewer in the Washington Post, while one of his idols, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, said that it was “as smart and funny and entertaining a travel book as you’ll find anywhere.”

All but one of the stories in “God Lives in Saint Petersburg” were actually written before “Chasing the Sea.” He found his voice as a short story writer early but finding a publisher proved harder, and he was advised to put out a nonfiction book first. While his essays appeared in Harper’s and other high-profile magazines, his stories had to make do with lesser-known venues such as Agni and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Mr. Bissell even used the stories now in book form to apply for several MFA programs, and – incredibly – was turned down.

“I almost stopped writing fiction,” he says. “It was a really close thing for a while. My nonfiction took off, and I thought, ‘What am I doing? Am I just fooling myself? Am I just not a fiction writer?’ I think fiction is really hard to write, really hard to sell, and hard to get people excited about.”

A demonstration of this had occurred the night before, when Mr. Bissell, who started his literary career as an editor at W.W. Norton, took part in a group reading at the Happy Ending bar in the Lower East Side. The bar is housed in what was once an erotic massage parlor, and the crowd, armed with iPods and martinis, was young, sharply dressed, and curiously inert.

“Something about showing enthusiasm in this city among young people is thought to be very square, which I find profoundly distressing because I’m very enthusiastic about things that I love,” Mr. Bissell says. “I’ve done a lot of readings, and people here laugh the least. They’re too cool for school.”

Mr. Bissell himself is not the cool type, even if his new book was given an “A” grade in Entertainment Weekly. He objects to the way some reviewers have approvingly projected onto his stories an anti-American world view he says he does not share. His impulse to write and his interest in suffering are centered around his father, who fought in the Vietnam War. It is what has led him to places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and now, as research for his next book, to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he recently spent four months.

“The great mystery when you’re a kid, and your father has been in a war,” he says, “is what did this person go through? When you’re a kid you play with guns, you play with toys, and you go from this idea that war is exhilarating, which I suspect it probably is, to a deeper kind of realization that actually war is just human viciousness distilled into its purest form. And because no one really has the right to ask someone what they did in a war, unless they’re totally willing to talk about it, I became interested in the idea of the unspeakable happening in places, and how people dealt with it.”

Though he believes that nonfiction can be as mysterious and unprogrammatic as great fiction, he wants to write more stories and eventually a novel. This is good news for his readers, because his nonfiction is occasionally hamstrung by a stern, slightly forced leftism that doesn’t always tally with his own observations. “Give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth,” Oscar Wilde said, and in his fiction Mr. Bissell is much more willing to drop the political correctness and let it rip. Donk, the photographer-hero of “Death Defier,” occasionally sounds like P.J. O’Rourke: “How was it that these people, the Afghans, could, for two hundred years, hold off or successfully evade several of the world’s most go-getting empires and not find it within themselves to pave a f-ing road?”

Then there’s the smart-ass narrator of “The Ambassador’s Son,” holed up in “one of the old Soviet republics where you started drinking at ten, started really drinking at fifteen, and dropped dead of it around fifty. The kind of place that was so corrupt you had to bribe yourself to get out of bed in the morning.” A few paragraphs on, he’s caught in flagrante with not one but two Russian girls by his own mother. (In the basement of the United States Embassy, no less.) “I liked the Capital because you could always find something to do there,” says the ambassador’s son cheerfully. “Booze, women, dancing – you name it. As for the rest of the country, the guidebook writers could have it.”

Mr. Bissell says that his book on Vietnam, though nonfiction, will include an impressively detailed taxonomy of some of the illicit pleasures to be found in Ho Chi Minh City. Asked whether he’d indulged in any Graham Greene-ish behavior, such as smoking opium, during his stay there, he replies that he was mostly a spectator. But he does note that you can buy pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes with ease, and that if you’re a Westerner, there are parts of the city where you can do “whatever the hell you want” without fear of the police. “It’s really kind of disgusting,” adds the Mr. Bissell who calls himself “a principled leftie.” And then that other Mr. Bissell, the one who relishes the world’s madness, laughs.

Mr. Bernhard is the East Coast correspondent for LA Weekly.