Showing results by author "Howard Fast" in All Categories

This collection of short stories encompasses 20 years of work by Howard Fast, including some of his best-known and most treasured tales. Not merely fantasy or science fiction, these "Zen stories" explore the world’s mysterious and unanswerable questions, big and small, and the results are at once bizarre, humorous, chilling, and poignant. The 31 stories in Time and the Riddle showcase Fast’s range and supreme talent as a storyteller.

When the love of his life is accused of murder, a university professor will stop at nothing to prove her innocence. On a late night drive home, Ike Goldman, a retired Columbia University law professor, saves a woman from killing herself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. The woman's name is Elizabeth Hopper, and Ike, a widower, unexpectedly finds himself falling in love. Everything changes when Elizabeth's estranged husband, a rich Wall Street executive she claims abused her, is found murdered, and Elizabeth is the prime suspect.

The inspiring story of Max Britsky, who grew up in the slums of New York and became one of the most powerful men in the American movie industry. Max tells the story of the rise of Max Britsky, entwined with the film industry’s beginnings near the turn of the twentieth century. When he was twelve, Max's father died, leaving him to scrape out a living in Manhattan's Lower East Side slums to provide for his mother and siblings. But Max was a natural entrepreneur, and he followed his business instincts and love of the theater to become one of the first film moguls in the history of American moviemaking.

A small-town girl flees from the assassin she hired to kill her when the doctor in her small hometown tells Sally Dillman that she has six months to live, the quiet young schoolteacher sells her house and moves to New York City. She comes not to see the sights, not for one last thrill, but to die as quickly as possible. Savings in hand, she pays a mobster $3,000 to put a contract out on her life. She wants to be killed before leukemia saps her strength, and she wants it to be a surprise. Only later does she learn of her terrible mistake.

Five generations of Preswicks, living, loving, fighting, laughing, and dying in a surge of limitless power that paralleled the course of America. A full tale of a family that grew with America, of an Aristocracy that gained everything but reason to live. Two women bore John Preswick two children - one the daughter of a southern innkeeper, who nursed a broken Revolutionary soldier back to health, the other a girl in New York, who waited seven years for her lover to return from the war.

The Naked God is Howard Fast's public repudiation of the Communist Party, of which he was a devoted member for thirteen years until reading about the full scope of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The best-selling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine, Howard Fast lent his writing talents and celebrity to the communist cause as a steadfast advocate and public figure. However, he felt increasingly ill at ease with the superior manner Party leaders took with rank-and-file members and with rumors of Soviet anti-Semitism.

The Hunter and The Trap presents two thrilling and suspenseful stories by Howard Fast, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century. In “The Hunter,” celebrated but down-on-his-luck novelist Andrew Bell returns to New York from an African safari only to find himself the prey in someone else’s big game hunt. Bell must seek the help of an old friend in order to escape with his life.

Among Howard Fast's historical fiction, Citizen Tom Paine - one of America's all-time best-sellers - occupies a special place, for it restored to a generation of readers the vision of Paine's revolutionary passion as the authentic roots of our national beginnings. Fast gives us "a vivid picture of Paine's mode of writing, idiosyncrasies, and character-generous, nobly unselfish, moody, often dirty, frequently drunken, a revolutionist by avocation" ( Library Journal).

Howard Fast's firsthand account of the infamous 1949 Peekskill riots, including historical documents, photos, and newspaper reports. In 1949, author Howard Fast found himself in the middle of a violent and terrifying anticommunist riot in Peekskill, New York. Fast was the master of ceremonies at a civil rights benefit concert featuring Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and others. But local newspapers stoked anticommunist anger, and the event was besieged by a mob armed with rocks, clubs, fence posts, and knives.

In 1944, there was still no united Yugoslavia, the Axis controlled most of Europe, and D-Day was only in the planning stages. In the Balkans, Tito was a beacon of hope against the advancing Nazis. He led a force of resistance fighters that bedeviled the occupying German army throughout Slavic regions and empowered people's committees to act as local government in all liberated areas. For observers on the political left, Tito seemed uniquely poised to unite the East and West against fascism - once and for all.

Bruce Baron was a first rate foreign correspondent during World War II, but his association with the Communist Party plunges him into trouble with the McCarthy witch hunts. His only salvation is the passionate and feisty Molly Maguire but her own political leanings do nothing to help his cause.

Big bugs, cloned cats, and feral star-children play leading roles in the seven stories that make up Fast’s unconventional and thought-provoking collection. The Edge of Tomorrow is a significant foray into science fiction by one of the 20th century’s most prolific novelists. In looking beyond our universe, Fast reveals much about the America of his time - where the Cold War and a nascent civil rights movement stoked unconscious fears and desires.

Howard Fast has placed the entire action of this highly charged novel in the space of one day at the substantial home of a prominent United States senator. This dinner party sounds like a well-ordered and gracious affair, but as events unfold, there are things to be settled - some are political and ethical, some are emotional, and some are questions of life and death. This is a profound and important novel with the dramatic intensity of first-class theater.

Nearly forty years after the publication of his first story, "The Wrath of Purple," in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Howard Fast returned to the genre with a set of nine supremely entertaining tales. In this collection, a Vietnam general shoots down what appears to be an angel, a man sells his soul to the devil for a copy of the next day's Wall Street Journal, and a group of alien beings bestow a mouse with human thought and emotion.

These nineteen stories follow the paths of men and women, immigrants, minorities, and the poor, suffering from injustice and inequality. Written in the 1940s, Fast's clear-eyed and lively tales examine a world reeling from war and plagued by social unrest. With stories set in New York City, Europe, and India, this collection shares a remarkable global vision. Written during the rising Communist scare, Departure is a defiantly leftist portrait of a complex and ever-changing world.