Ben Fountain has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, an O.Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. 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 and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His reportage on post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.
-
Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera"
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara:Stories -
Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Bouki and the Cocaine"
“I want you to tell me about the cocaine,” said Michelet.
“Of course, m’sieu le chef. Which cocaine, please?”
Michelet’s teeth did a slow, decalcifying grind. For all his power he looked whipped sitting there in his truck, like a man in serious trouble with his wife. “We heard that a load of contraband was dropped at Cayes Caiman last week. On Thursday. And you were seen there on Thursday.”
“Yeah? Hmmm, I don’t know, m’sieu le chef. Cayes Caiman, yeah, sure, I go there sometimes, it’s a good place for sirik and chadwon. But you know I’m not so good with days. Thursday, you said?”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara:Stories -
Brief Encounters with Che GuevaraStoriesFrom"Fantasy for Eleven Fingers"
The effect on audiences was astonishing. From the first reported performance, in October 1831, there were accounts of seizures, faintings, and fits of epilepsy among the spectators; though some accused Visser of paying actors to mimic and encourage such convulsions, the phenomenon appears to have been accepted as genuine. Mass motor hysteria would most likely be the diagnosis today, though a physician from Gossl who witnessed one performance proposed theories having to do with electrical contagion; others linked the Fantasy to the Sistine Chapel Syndrome, the hysterics to which certain foreign women—English spinsters, chiefly—sometimes fall prey while viewing the artistic treasures of Italy.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara:Stories
“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not merely good; it’s Pulitzer Prize-quality good . . . A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“[An] inspired, blistering war novel . . . Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience.” —The New York Times [on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk]
“A masterful echo of Catch-22, with war in Iraq at the center . . . a gut-punch of a debut novel . . . There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel.” —The Washington Post [on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk]
“Fountain’s excellent first novel follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day . . . Through the eyes of the titular soldier, Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. [Fountain has] a pitch-perfect ear for American talk . . .” —The New Yorker [on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Bookshop
