Ben Fountain

The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught—to both disastrous and hilarious effect—in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain's prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

Stories

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Patrick Book

Truly wonderful short fiction is so thrilling. It’s a shock to the system to see an incredibly gifted writer execute a taught, brief work that is as dense and intriguing as something ten times its page count. This collection is up there with the best of Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro...any of them! The bulk of the stories focus on wayward Americans in foreign lands, often in situations beyond their control, reflecting the self-interest and moral ambiguity that marks the worst of that nation’s impulses in what seem on their surface to be black and white situations. 

The book gets stronger as it goes, ending with a truly remarkable outlier: ‘Fantasy for Eleven Fingers.’ This piece of faux-biography is a masterclass all on its own, the detail so exquisite as to nearly overshadow its delightfully rich ending. 

The level of character development, concise plotting, and emotional payoff of these stories is just great. I am delighted.

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.

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara Stories

Reviews