Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Ben Fountain

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain (Paperback ISBN 9780857867117) book cover

Available as Paperback

A dazzling debut collection of stories from the author of BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK

This debut collection from the man Malcolm Gladwell described as a genius took readers by storm. From the slums of Haiti to a golf course in Myanmar, and from the Colombian jungle to the diamond mines of Sierra Leone, Ben Fountain’s impeccable and devastatingly funny stories describe a world in political and social upheaval, and the lives caught in the balance.


“Exceptional … Each of these eight stories is as rich as a novel … Heartbreaking, absurd, deftly drawn”
new York Times

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“Fountain has the storytelling gifts to bring the world home to us and a moral compass set to true north”
Gary Shteyngart

“Brave, intelligent fiction”
independent On Sunday

“The work of a very talented writer who is keenly engaged with analysing American identity in the wider world… Beyond the pleasures of Fountain’s vivid image-making and fluent storytelling, his collection’s great accomplishment is the depth of reality it gives the foreign settings”
Chris Power
guardian

“It is such an unexpected joy, in this age of introspection, to discover an American writer with a global outlook”
Jim Crace, Author Of Being Dead


Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain is the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and a debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2012 National Book Award. In addition, he has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, an O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prizes. He was also shortlisted for the International Author of the Year Award in 2012.

His fiction has been published in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story and Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times among other publications. He lives in Dallas, Texas.