Ben Fountain interview: Lies are an affront to writers because lying is the corruption of language

Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It would appear that it was well worth the wait, as it immediately met with praise, awarded both the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting Award. This success continued when his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was published five years later. In the last six months alone, it has won two awards in America, including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award, and nominated for a further two here in the UK.

His short story collection explores America’s perennial mission to rectify global strife, scrutinising corruption, fiscal greed and the Realpolitik of diplomacy through the figure of ‘the American abroad’. Amongst the eight stories, there is a graduate student who is taken hostage by guerrilla rebels in Columbia, an observer from the Organization of American who plays chess in Haiti and an aid-worker who establishes a co-operative in Sierra Leone.