Brief Encounters With Che Guevara: Stories (2006)

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Fountain walks the fine line between hilarity and despair in the series of short stories set in areas ranging from war-torn Africa to golf courses in Myanmar to Ft. Bragg.

An aid worker asks to go to the worst place possible, and finds herself in Sierra Leone during the times gangs are wandering around and chopping off the limbs of all they meet. "Her work was a delaying action at best, a brief comfort and hope to a very small few - she was handing them a glass of water through the window while the house burned down around their heads."

As the aid worker ferries a group of refugees away from the gangs, "What the column must have looked like to someone watching from the bush, Jill could only imagine - like a nightmare, an apparition some sorcerer had conjured up, a shambling caravan of demons and freaks."

Beginning of the title story - "When I was six my father became president of a college in Virginia, a small, well-endowed Episcopal school to which generations of wealthy Southern families had sent their sons, and which, though it had admitted women since the early fifties, still very much expressed that ripe, combustible blend of sentimentality and viciousness so vital to the traditions fo the monied Southern male."

From one of several stories set in Haiti - "Don't ever laugh when a Haitian tells you he's going to be president, because it might happen. And if it does he won't forget that you laughed at him."

"She and Ponce had met shortly after the Aristede coup, when a ruthless military regime took control of the country; their romance had flourished amid the heady atmosphere of brutal repression and messianic resistance, but the adrenaline rush of those days was long gone."