Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories

**"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***