News 2011: Publication of Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings by Julian Silva

News 2011: Publication of Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings by Julian Silva
Publication of Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings by Julian Silva

Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth and the University Press of New England (UPNE) announce the publication of Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings by Julian Silva.

Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth and the University Press of New England (UPNE) announce the publication of Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings by Julian Silva.

Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings--a novella, short stories, and memory pieces--both extends the author'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.

Julian Silva is a fourth-generation Portuguese-American whose Azorean ancestors settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1870s. His first novel, The Gunnysack Castle, was initially published by Ohio University Press in 1983. Distant Music: Two Novels (The Gunnysack Castle and its sequel The Death of Mae Ramos) was published in 2007 by Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His short fiction has appeared in Writer's Forum, Kansas Quarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Cosmopolitan.

For more information regarding Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings, including how to purchase the book, please visit: http://www.upne.com/1-933227-33-8.html. To order any of our books, visit: http://www.upne.com/distributed/dist_TPD.html.

Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings is volume 15 of the Portuguese in the Americas Series published by Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, the newly-established publishing arm of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture. The Series documents the variety and complexity of the Portuguese-American experience by publishing books in the social sciences, history and literature.

Praise for Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings "No other American writer of his generation is nearly as urbane as Julian Silva--courteously and compassionately accepting of human fallibility and the messiness of love and death. He glides from gentle mockery to whiplash irony, an intrepid votary at flesh-and-blood altars, embracing the plight of outcasts, the insulted and the injured." Alexander Blackburn, former editor of the University of Colorado's Writers' Forum.