"An exceptional story collection"* featuring Americans abroad finding themselves in absurd cultural and political situations they don't understand.

A National BestsellerWinner of the PEN/Hemingway Award

The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevera—including a disillusioned NGO worker, the wife of a special operations officer, and an obsessed 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.

"Each of these eight stories are as rich as a novel. . . . Heartbreaking, absurd, [and] deftly drawn." —* New York Times Book Review

"An impressive performance from an author with a gift for reaching into the past and producing something compelling and new." — Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Ben Fountain writes the kind of stories that Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene used to write . . . full of complex adventure and off-balance humor." — San Diego Union-Tribune