Howard Fast - The General Zapped an Angel - Stories

It was a little better the next day, and by the third day I convinced Jane to leave the house with me and to walk a little. She covered herself at first, but after a while her fear began to dissipate, and then, bit by bit, it became something you live with—as I suppose anything can. The following week I sat down to write this account. I have been working on it for three days. Yesterday a bee lighted on the back of my hand, a large, fuzzy, working bumblebee. I held my hand firmly and looked at the bee, and the bee returned my stare.

Then the bee flew away, and I had a feeling that it was over and that what would happen had happened. But how we will pick it up and what we will put together, I don’t know. I talked about it with my wife last night.

“I hope Basehart is alive and well,” she said. “It would be nice to see him again.” Which was rather curious, since all she knew about Basehart was what I had told her. Then she began to cry. She was not a woman who cries a great deal, and soon she dried her eyes and took up some sewing that she had laid aside weeks before. I lit my pipe. It was the last of the day. We sat there in silence as darkness fell.

I lit our single kerosene lamp, and she said to me, “We will have to go down to the village sooner or later, won’t we?”

“Sooner or later,” I agreed.

HOWARD FASTwas one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century. He was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. The son of immigrants, Fast grew up in New York City and published his first novel upon finishing high school in 1933. In 1950, his refusal to provide the United States Congress with a list of possible Communist associates earned him a three-month prison sentence. During his incarceration, Fast wrote one of his best-known novels, Spartacus , which was adapted into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. Fast died in Greenwich, Connecticut in 2003.

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SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS BY HOWARD FAST

Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel, and Other Stories of a Young Nation (1945)

Departure, and Other Stories (1949)

The Last Supper and Other Stories (1955)

The Howard Fast Reader: A Collection of Stories and Novels (1960)

The Edge of Tomorrow (1961)

The Hunter and The Trap (1967)

The General Zapped an Angel (1970)

A Touch of Infinity (1973)

Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (1975)

The Call of Fife and Drum: Three Novels of the Revolution (1987)

The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles

Catastrophe by Dino Buzzati

The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins

Continent by Jim Crace

The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates

Mr. and Mrs. Baby by Mark Strand

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger

Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson

THE GENERAL ZAPPED AN ANGEL. Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Howard Fast. Preface copyright © 2019 by Mark Harris. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover art: The Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, Plate No. 73 © Johanna Goodman

Background Texture on Title Page by Ethnic Design /Shutterstock, Inc.

Originally published in 1969 by Ace Books, a division of Charter Communications Inc., by arrangement with William Morrow & Co., Inc.

FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2019.

Digital Edition DECEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-290845-2

Version 10232019

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290844-5

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