Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth
2011
Move Over, Scopes
and Other Writings
Julian Silva
Richly-textured narratives of Portuguese-American life, mixing culture politics with arch playfulness.
Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings both extends Julian Silva’s richly-textured portrait of Portuguese-American community life in his narrative diptych, Distant Music, and enlarges it to include subjects as varied as backbiting London theatre has-beens (“The Waxworks Show”), a final pilgrimage to the Brontë parsonage (“A Visit to Haworth”), and recollections of a Japanese-American babysitter interned following Pearl Harbor (“Kimi”). As always, Silva is fully attentive to descriptive detail and apt choice of metaphor—nowhere more so than in recalling livestock being raised and dispatched in “Coming to Terms with the Facts of Animal Life.” The novella Move Over, Scopes, however, does it all, as Henry Ramos attempts to mollify fellow Portuguese-American Catholics—led by his own wife Louise—outraged over Estelle Dobson teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Twists and turns include machinations of a hotly contested School Board election and the need to resist Miss Dobson’s seductive appeal. At a time when Creationism may be making a come-back, Move Over, Scopes could not be more timely.
Table of Contents
· Acknowledgments
· Move Over, Scopes
· Brave Cossacks
· The Waxworks Show
· The Tortoiseshell Caddy
· A Candle in the Wind
· A Visit to Haworth
· Kimi
· My Jo
· Coming to Terms with the Facts of Animal Life
· The Woman in the Doorway
(Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth)
Julian Silva is a fourth-generation Portuguese-American whose Azorean ancestors first settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1870s. His novel, The Gunnysack Castle, was first published by Ohio Universiy Press in 1983. The second section of the Death of Mae Ramos, “Vasco and the Other” was originally published in 1979 in Writer’s Forum 6, University of Colorado. In 2007, Distant Music Two novels: Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos was published by Portuguese in the Americas Series, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Distant Music is the story of the Woods (anglicized Portuguese) and Ramos families and their descendants in California. In these narratives Julian Silva “celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but, even more important, he exposes the compromised morality of their achievement” (Portuguese in the Americas Series). His ‘unpublished’ short fiction has appeared in blog Comunidades. Julian Silva lives in San Francisco.
