Many of the stories in Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (HarperCollins $13.95) are set in the world’s most impoverished and crime-ridden countries: Haiti, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Myanmar. The protagonists face moral challenges–sometimes with disastrous, but often with humorous results. In “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera,” a graduate student studying birds in Colombia is taken hostage by revolutionaries. He is sympathetic to their cause, but when their goals are corrupted by big business his objections lead to an ironic and darkly amusing conclusion. My favorite story, “Bouki and the Cocaine,” reveals the creative efforts of some Haitian fishermen to sabotage a drug-smuggling operation. The stories in Fountain’s first collection are so substantial and satisfying, they often seem more like novellas. ~ Carol Santoro