"A brilliant book of stories that rides through territory already charted by Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. His stories elicit that laughter that assails us when witnessing the most brutal and harsh follies of human nature.
David Means

The protagonists of Fleeting Encounters with Che Guevara are unsuspecting or well-intentioned Americans who, while passing through Sierra Leone, Colombia or Haiti, are suddenly caught up in the maelstrom of political or social convulsions in the environment, with sometimes disastrous results, sometimes hilarious. An ornithologist kidnapped by the Colombian guerrilla sympathizes with the political cause of his captors, until he realizes how much the Revolution resembles a big business. A disenchanted international aid worker makes a Faustian pact whereby she becomes a diamond smuggler for the common good. The wife of a Special Forces officer has to face a Haitian voodoo goddess with whom her husband maintains a not entirely spiritual relationship.

Masterfully paced and with a tremendous sense of the absurd, each of the eight stories in this book is an adventure steeped in that heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope that characterizes changing societies. The first work by Ben Fountain, whom critics have compared to authors of the stature of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Fleeting Encounters with Che Guevara intelligently shows how the human factor serves as a connection between apparently irreconcilable worlds, turning the strange into the familiar and the familiar into strange.