Most Popular Books by Howard Fast

An epic novel of Berenice, Queen of Israel—life, love, and war in the shadow of the Roman Empire—from the New York Times–bestselling author of Spartacus. Throughout her rule in the first century AD, Queen Berenice is idolized by some, and hated by others. Though her fiery red hair makes her instantly recognizable, it is her mysterious charm and steely will that make her unforgettable. The daughter of Israel’s King Agrippa I, Berenice is determined to free the kingdom of Israel from the shadow of the Roman Empire. But her plans are derailed after her husband, Shimeon, dies during a bloody civil war. When Berenice falls in love with Titus, son of the Roman Emperor, they devise an impossible plan to join the ruling lines of Rome and Israel. A master of gripping historical fiction, Howard Fast brings the ancient world to vivid life in this enthralling, epic drama. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

DIVBestselling author Howard Fast’s final novel—a page-turning tale of intrigue, power, and betrayal set in one of America’s wealthiest suburbs/div DIVGreenwich follows a diverse cast of characters in one of the country’s most affluent towns: Greenwich, Connecticut. When evidence emerges that Richard Castle, a wealthy ex-government official, approved the 1980 killings of Jesuit priests and nuns in El Salvador, Castle must find a way to save himself from his ruthless former colleagues, who are bent on keeping the past buried any way they can. Told with Fast’s typical brisk pacing, Greenwich explores the links between wealth and power, and the violence waged to maintain them./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

DIVDIVFast’s epic novel, about one man’s family tree stretching through history from the Revolutionary War, portrays the best and worst of the American experiment/divDIV /divDIVBroken and sick, a young Revolutionary War soldier from New York is taken in by an innkeeper’s family and nursed to health. The soldier, John Preswick, falls in love with the innkeeper’s daughter, even as his wife Inez waits back home. Through five generations, the two families he starts share an intertwined fate. The Preswicks take part in some of the country’s most significant episodes, from the Civil War to the California Gold Rush, with fortunes discovered, lost, and made on the backs of others./divDIV /divDIVA tenacious chronicler of American history, Howard Fast was one of the most prolific historical novelists of the twentieth century. Strange Yesterday is perhaps his most sweeping, ambitious novel./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div/div

DIVDIVAs the Red Scare grips America, a midwestern literature professor becomes an unlikely hero in the struggle for freedom /divDIVProfessor Silas Timberman has never been one for theatrics. A quiet American literature professor at a mid-sized college, Timberman decides to build a semester’s course around the democratic ideals of Mark Twain—a subject that under normal circumstances would not arouse the suspicions of the university administration. But as the Korean War rages on and congressional investigations of potential Communists gain traction, no amount of ideological nuance is safe. When Timberman is asked to renounce his work or face the repercussions, he finds that not only his tenure but also his very freedom is at stake./divDIV /divDIVInspired by Fast’s own persecution at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Silas Timberman is a gripping record of the injustices of McCarthyism and a rousing ode to those who fought against it./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div/div

DIVHoward Fast’s 1987 New York Times bestseller, a tight political drama that remains just as relevant today as when it was first written/div DIVFast’s 1987 novel The Dinner Party confronts issues including American intervention in Latin America and the AIDS epidemic. Often compared to a play, The Dinner Party takes place during a single day, culminating in a party hosted by Richard Cromwell, a US Senator whose wealthy entrepreneur father-in-law is building a controversial highway across Central America, though powerful government interests want the highway stopped stopped. International politics become deeply personal in this novel, and unfailingly serve as a commentary on contemporary politics./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

DIVBestselling author Howard Fast’s straightforward introduction to Zen meditation/div DIVHoward Fast began to formally practice Zen meditation after turning away from communism in 1956. The Art of Zen Meditation, originally published by the antiwar political collective Peace Press in 1977, is the fruit of Fast’s study: a brief and instructive history of Zen Buddhism and its tenets, written with a simplicity that is emblematic of the philosophy itself. Fast’s study of Zen also inspired his popular Masao Masuto mystery series about a Zen Buddhist detective in Beverly Hills, which he published under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham./divDIV /divDIVThe Art of Zen Meditation is illustrated with twenty-three beautiful photographs./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

"Howard Fast is fiercely American, he is one of ours, one of our very best." —The Los Angeles Times One battle will determine the fate of Boston Three thousand soldiers from the world''s greatest army are cornered in Boston, surrounded by farmers and doctors turned rebel soldiers and generals. For a week both sides are at an impasse, until June 17, 1775, when the standstill comes to a violent, bloody end on Breed''s and Bunker hills. In Bunker Hill, master storyteller Howard Fast recounts the unlikely battle that changed the course of the Revolutionary War forever. Tensions rise among both the British and Colonial soldiers as political and tactical frustrations, dissent, confusion, and fear threaten to tear both sides apart before the fighting even begins. "Fast is at his best as Storyteller." —Christian Science Monitor

DIVA New York detective’s investigation of a Catholic priest’s murder leads him to a shocking drug plot that reaches the highest seats of American power /div DIVDetective Mel Freedman’s life changes forever the day Joe Cullen walks into his New York City office to confess to murder. Cullen, a pilot and Vietnam veteran, has come to admit his guilt in the murder of an American priest, thrown from a helicopter to his death in the jungles of El Salvador 800 feet below. But when a prostitute to whom Cullen also confessed turns up dead, Freedman quickly realizes that there is much more to Cullen’s story than meets the eye. As he digs deeper into the mystery, Freedman unravels a tangled web of conspiracy stretching from the cocaine fields of Central America all the way to CIA headquarters. /divDIV /divDIVTense and thought-provoking, The Confession of Joe Cullen is a powerful thriller about government corruption and the individuals who try to combat it, by one of the most masterful American writers of the twentieth century./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

The New York Times–bestselling author of Spartacus evokes the postwar Jewish-American experience through the story of a compassionate but conflicted rabbi. After witnessing the inhumanity and devastating suffering of Dachau, chaplain David Hartman returns to post–World War II America seeking meaning and purpose. As a young rabbi, he accepts a post in the sleepy, WASPy Connecticut suburb of Leighton Ridge, where a handful of Jewish families want to build a religious community. Accompanied by his lively wife, Lucy, a self-proclaimed “Jewish atheist,” and aided by a kindred spirit in the local Congregational minister, David meets skepticism with sincerity, and poverty with humility and humor—and faces anti-Semitism with quiet courage. Over the next quarter century, David and his family and congregation weather the social upheavals of McCarthyism, the establishment of Israel’s statehood, the trial and execution of the “atom spies,” civil rights marches, and Vietnam War protests. David finds both his faith and his marriage tested as he continues to struggle with feeling marginalized as a rabbi and a Jew in American society, haunted by the Holocaust and challenged to respond to the prejudice, inequality, and warmongering he sees locally and nationally. Capturing a tumultuous time when humanity was rapidly figuring out how to destroy itself and eager to declare God if not dead, then irrelevant, Howard Fast’s sweeping historical novel offers an intimately personal portrayal of a rabbi’s life—and fearlessly probes questions of personal morality, spiritual identity, and social responsibility that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

An “eerily successful” novel of the fifteenth-century Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition from the New York Times–bestselling author of Spartacus (Kirkus Reviews). Bestselling author Howard Fast’s 1966 novelization of the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, is a terrifying drama about one of history’s most notorious individuals. Prior Thomas de Torquemada and Don Alvaro de Rafel, a Spanish knight, have been friends for many years. But when Torquemada is named Spain’s Grand Inquisitor by King Ferdinand and begins to hear whispers that Alvaro may have a secret Jewish past, he transforms from Alvaro’s old friend into a menacing new enemy.Inspired by Fast’s experiences being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his subsequent jailing and blacklisting, Torquemada is a thrilling historical tale from a master of the genre. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

DIVA collection of thirteen stunning stories by one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth century/div DIVA follow-up to his 1970 science fiction collection, The General Zapped an Angel, Fast’s book of thirteen new science fiction stories is brisk and engrossing. In “The Hoop,” a scientist builds a portal to an unknown destination, which the mayor of New York City hijacks to use as a garbage dump until the location’s surprising, and hilarious, revelation. And in “The Egg,” set three thousand years in the future, a research team discovers an egg, something they have never seen before, cryogenically frozen in a nuclear bunker. These thirteen stories are bizarre, hilarious, poignant, and sure to entertain./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

DIVFast’s book on his break with the Communist Party, and a riveting tribute to the importance of justice and beauty over dogma and rigidity/div DIVThe 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 bestselling 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. In his first book after officially leaving the Party in 1956, Howard Fast explores the reasons he joined and his long inner struggle with a political movement in which he never felt he truly belonged./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

DIVHoward Fast’s controversial essay on the proper role of literature, offering insight into his life and works/div DIVIn this 1950 essay, Howard Fast argues that all writers have a duty to reflect the truth of the world in their works, particularly regarding social justice. Fast’s treatise on literary criticism allows for a fuller understanding of his early novels, in which his political beliefs remain inseparable from his writing./divDIV /divDIVLiterature and Reality, which Fast wrote around the time of the 1949 Peekskill riots, offers a unique window into his worldview during the mid-twentieth century./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

The fifth installment of Fast’s bestselling Immigrants series, continuing the story of one of his most beloved characters, Barbara Lavette. Howard Fast’s immensely popular Immigrants saga spanned six novels and more than a century of the Lavette family history. The series was considered one of the crowning achievements of his long career. This New York Times bestseller is the fifth entry in the series and focuses on one of his most beloved characters, Barbara Lavette, whom Fast based on his first wife. At sixty, Barbara is living a quiet life in San Francisco, grieving after the death of a longtime male friend. However, her spirits revive when she mounts an unexpectedly competitive congressional campaign. After narrowly losing the election, Barbara begins to reconnect with her past as a journalist and human rights activist, two passions that reignite the spark of adventure in her life. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

DIVA collection of Fast’s best short fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to philosophy and suspense/div DIVThis collection of short stories encompasses twenty 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. An American general shoots down what appears to be an angel during a Vietnam War battle, a celebrated author becomes a hunted man, and a mouse is granted human thought and emotion by a group of alien beings. The thirty-one stories in Time and the Riddle showcase Fast’s range and supreme talent as a storyteller./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

Two full-length mysteries featuring Nisei detective Masao Masuto are together in one volume. In "The Case of the Sliding Pool", Masuto investigates the identity of a skeleton found when a swimming pool collapses. And in "The Case of the Kidnapped Angel", the husband of a kidnapped Hollywood sex goddess does not return from paying her ransom.

The New York Times–bestselling Lavette family saga from the author of Spartacus continues through the turmoil of Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. The fourth installment of the Immigrants saga follows Barbara Lavette, the daughter of a self-made Italian immigrant, through the turmoil of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, the feminist and civil rights movements, and Israel’s Six Day War with Egypt. Though Fast wrote over eighty books, including Spartacus, April Morning, and Freedom Road, his Immigrants novels remain some of his most personal and moving works. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

DIVDetective Masuto investigates a Hollywood kidnapping that leads to a shocking conspiracy/div DIVAngel is Hollywood royalty. Her husband, Mike Barton, is one of the silver screen’s most bankable stars, and their marriage has all the hallmarks of a Beverly Hills fairy tale. But everything about Angel’s past is kept secret, including her real name. When reporters ask why Mike dubbed her Angel, she says that she must have fallen from heaven. No one knows where Angel Barton is from, and now no one knows where she has gone./divDIV /divDIVWhen his wife disappears, Barton readily agrees to a million dollar ransom demanded by her kidnappers, but Zen detective Masao Masuto doesn’t buy his performance. As Masuto pries into the strange kidnapping case, he finds that Barton might be much more likely to pay to get rid of his wife than to keep her./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

DIVDetective Masuto reopens an investigation into a murderous film star—with deadly consequences/div DIVOn the day that Eve Mackenzie murders her husband, Masao Masuto is on a plane to Japan. For years he and his wife, both American-born Japanese, have dreamed of visiting their homeland, and though the trip is a delight, the Zen Buddhist detective cannot help but check the international papers for news of murder on his home turf of Beverly Hills. Part of him regrets missing the sensational Mackenzie killing. Once a high-profile film star, Eve faded from the public eye after wedding a wealthy Scotsman—an unhappy marriage that ended in bloodshed. When Masuto returns home, Eve is headed toward an inevitable conviction. Why, then, does he reopen the case?/divDIV /divDIVThe evidence against the Hollywood starlet is so airtight that Masuto suspects a frame-up. As he pries into the closed case, more blood spills. Eve Mackenzie may not have murdered her husband, but she is far from innocent./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate./div

"Originally written under the pseudonym E.V. Cunningham"--T.p. verso.

As the sinister shadow of McCarthyism spreads across America, a woman fights to save everything she holds dear. Lola Gregg grew up the daughter of a respected physician in a tiny factory town. She married and had children, perfectly content in her quiet suburban existence. But Lola has a problem: at a time when progressivism is considered a national threat, Lola and her husband are on the wrong side of the political spectrum. When the FBI begins to tail her husband due to his leftist affiliations, Lola is forced to choose between her deeply held beliefs and the very safety of her family. Intense and thought-provoking, Lola Gregg is a potent thriller about one woman''s struggle to preserve ideological freedom against the reactionary forces of her day. Based partially on a true story.

It''s been 11 years since a young actress was raped by half a dozen men on a Hollywood set. She was never seen again. Now, one by one, the very same men who participated in the rape are being slain. Racing against time, Masao Masuto must uncover the killer''s identity. Original.

Children living in New York city slum.

It is 1945, and soldiers have returned home from Europe and the Pacific to take up their former lives. But in Clarkton, a small Massachusetts factory town, a high-stakes labor battle quickly turns violent, turning what should be a time of peace and prosperity into a bloody conflict that draws in every citizen. No one remains untouched, from rigid factory owner George Clark Lowell, to a small army of labor organizers of every background, to reptilian strike-buster Hamilton Gelb, to the shopkeepers, barbers, and priests that watch in confusion and horror as the nightmare unfolds. Clarkton is a potent novel of one town’s fight against oppression, and a chilling reflection on the American labor movement after the Second World War.