Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award * A National Bestseller

An exceptional story collection. --New York Times Book Review

The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevera--including a disillusioned NGO worker, the wife of a special operations officer, and an obssessed ornithologist--are caught, to both disastrous and hilarious effect, in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them.

With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story is a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition. An intelligent and keenly observed collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevera marks the arrival of a striking and resonant new voice that speaks adeptly to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.