Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honours 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.