Atlantic Islander
09-02-2013, 11:31 PM
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Almost Gone
“Sousa manages to make almost every story a stand-alone piece, while constructing a whole that feels, in the end, like an exquisitely rendered novel.”—SansSerif.com
Alternately gritty, suspenseful, and illuminating, Brian Sousa’s debut collection of interlocking stories depicts the Portuguese American experience from a new perspective
Brian Sousa leaves sentiment and saudade behind in Almost Gone, a linked collection spanning four generations of a Portuguese immigrant family. In this hardscrabble world, the youth struggle with the secrets left behind by their elders, as their parents fought through the pain and joy of assimilation. Told through various perspectives, Almost Gone is a working-class tale of survival that finds no easy answers, but cuts straight to the bone.
Endorsements:
“Almost Gone is an evocative, sensual journey that carries us from Portugal to America, by way of the human heart.”—Lise Haines, author of Girl in the Arena, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, and In My Sister's Country
“The deceptively straightforward stories of Almost Gone sneak up to unfold in every direction, across distance and generations, as in raw-edged, pared-down lyricism Brian Sousa reveals a humming web of tragedy and wonder staked across the sprawling networks of modern life. In his resonant overlapping of characters losing and finding themselves he works magic, revealing those timeless in-between spaces where life—and art—mean the most.” —Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade
- BRIAN SOUSA’s stories and poems have been published in various journals and anthologies. He teaches writing at Boston College.
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Another City upon a Hill - A New England Memoir
A searching portrait of a city battered by the collapse of the textile industry woven into a spirited coming of age story
This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti’s world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
Endorsements:
“An expert historian’s wonderfully honest memoir of growing up in Fall River, ‘the city of hills, mills, and dinner pails.’ It’s an authentic American story, beautifully told.” —Gordon S. Wood, Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution
“Conforti has written a marvelously engaging memoir of self-discovery and the making of a historian. By exploring and coming to terms with his roots in a New England mill city, he tells a story that is quintessentially American. Always aware of context, from his boyhood in Fall River in the 1950s to his young adulthood in the 1970s, Conforti treats the reader to often brilliant and sometimes humorous insight into the ethnic cultures of New England, its industrial and Yankee past, its post-industrial present, and its sometimes seedy politics.” —Ron Formisano, author of The Tea Party: A Brief History and Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
- JOSEPH A. CONFORTI is Distinguished Professor of American and New England Studies Emeritus at University of Southern Maine. He is the author of five books, including Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America and the acclaimed Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-twentieth Century.
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Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States - Arguments about History, Culture, and Transnational Connections
An intriguing comparison of identity formation among Portuguese immigrants from the Azores Islands and their descendants in Brazil and the U.S.
This comparative investigation of Azorean identity formation in southern Brazil and southeastern New England explores how immigrants and their descendants actively create local, national, and transnational connections and discourses of belonging. These two outposts of the Azorean diaspora have very different settlement histories: the Azorean settlement of Santa Catarina dates back to the mid-18th century and has not been augmented by any new immigration for over 250 years; Azorean emigration to southeastern New England is largely a 19th and 20th century phenomenon that has led to the formation of large ethnic communities. The surprise at the heart of this book is that despite these very different immigration histories, collective interest in Azorean culture and public manifestations of Azoreanness are quite prominent in both places. The contrasts between these two very differently situated identity narratives offer insight into the variable and sometimes rather counter-intuitive processes of ethnic formation. These findings are pertinent to debates about the nature of ethnic identity and transnational communities.
Endorsements:
“Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States offers an insightful and rich ethnographic comparison of how identities are formed and transformed among Azoreans in New England and Brazil. The book touches on a host of questions of critical concern in contemporary immigration studies: transnationalism, the second generation, ethnicity, and the politics of culture.”—Caroline Brettell, Southern Methodist University
“Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States offers a rare, multi-sited portrayal of immigration and expressive culture focused on two hot spots of Azorean settlement. This is a fascinating comparative study and an important ethnography for scholars of Lusophone culture.”—Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Rutgers University
- JOĆO LEAL, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon, has written extensively on Portuguese culture and history.
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Community, Culture and The Makings of Identity - Portuguese-Americans along the Eastern Seaboard
Offers insight into the histories, cultures, and social dynamics of Portuguese and other Lusophone and Luso-African of the northeastern seaboard of the U.S.
Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity brings together explorations of Portuguese as well as other Lusophone and Luso-African populations that have settled in the immigrant hubs of the port cities and towns along the Northeastern seaboard of the U.S. The contributing scholars offer insight from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives into the histories, cultures, and intertwined social dynamics of these immigrant communities. The still understudied Portuguese-American story — which includes multiple waves of immigration that span two centuries, ongoing connections with a global diaspora, and complex relationships with post-colonial populations — has much to offer to our understandings of transnational migration and subsequent processes of identity and community formation among immigrants and their descents.
The contributors to this collection attend to questions about the meanings of citizenship and forms of national belonging; the role of expressive culture and media representations in process of identity formation; the factors shaping trajectories of social mobility and political representation; the complexly interconnected dynamics of work, gender and family in the immigrant context; and the formulations of racial and minority identities in this corner of the Portuguese disapora. The ethnographic richness and productive interplay of the contributions in this volume point to a whole array of new and as yet unexplored questions regarding the Portuguese-American and other interconnected communities.
- KIMBERLY DACOSTA HOLTON is Associate Professor and Director of the Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies Program at Rutgers University. ANDREA KLIMT is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
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The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales
"For any lover of fairy tales and questioner of life beyond the grave, this compilation is an absolute joy, flawless in both selection and delivery."—San Francisco and Sacramento Book Review
Inspired by the beauty and magic of the Azorean archipelago, this collection transports readers from the natural to the supernatural
Born from the fertile volcanic soil and the sea and mists surrounding the Azorean islands, the characters who inhabit these stories blend realism with magic. Like the nine Muses, each island has its own special attributes. Whether searching for love, power, or meaning, these characters are subject to the whims of Fate and Fortune. Here the commonplace present confronts forces both natural and supernatural. In the Azorean microcosm, they come to represent a far larger sphere, embodying the foibles and idiosyncrasies of humanity the world over.
- DARRELL KASTIN was born in Los Angeles, the son of an Azorean mother and a father of Russian/Jewish descent. His novel, The Undiscovered Island, won the 2010 IPPY Independent Publisher's Silver Award for Multicultural Fiction. He is also a musician and a composer.
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Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934
A comedic portrait of Portuguese American life during the Great Depression
Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is the story of an election for mayor in a Massachusetts mill town in 1934 as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Portuguese boy, Seraphin. The incumbent, a Yankee, is challenged by candidates from five different ethnic groups–Irish, French Canadian, Polish, Portuguese, and Jewish. A portrait of each candidate is subtly drawn and we meet campaign workers like Teddy, who has enlisted to help secure a teaching position for his daughter, and Jimmy, a numbers runner who proudly passes out cards announcing his appointment as Assistant Campaign Manager, North End.
But the novel is more than just the story of an election. The specter of the Depression hovers over every scene. Laura, Seraphin’s big sister, describes her job as a fruit-store clerk in every excruciatingly painful detail. And the allure of America is always present for Seraphin in his desire and longing to lead an American life. America also affects the remarkable Secundo B. Alves, the Portuguese candidate. Secundo’s memories of the Azores are honest, authentic, and touching. But when he is defeated in the primary, he quickly bounces back as a supporter of the Frenchman’s candidacy and rewrites his Vasco da Gama imagery. Secundo is showing the adaptability it takes to succeed in America. Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is a valuable historical document and an artistic triumph.
Endorsements:
“‘The Portuguese are the unknown people,’ declaims Secundo Alves. ‘To be Portuguese in America is to be a stone dropped in the middle of the ocean.’ Alves, one of Charles Reis Felix’s colorful and memorable characters, may be overstating the case, but not by much. And Reis Felix, in his novel of vignettes, brings the Portuguese to life with wit and humor, and above all, with an eye for telling detail that any American writer-of any ethnicity-should envy. This book captures the nature of immigrant New Bedford in a way that will make it relevant and entertaining reading for decades to come!”—Frank X. Gaspar, author of Leaving Pico
“The cotton mills of New Bedford have long since followed its whaling fleet into oblivion. Gone the ugly labor disputes and turf wars that once dominated the region’s headlines. Dead the mill owners and operatives who spun gold from cotton. But by a literary miracle, not everyone who was witness to New Bedford’s decline and fall has forgotten it. In his wonderful new novel, the octogenarian writer (and New Bedford native) Charles Reis Felix tells what it was like to be young and proud and poor and Portuguese in the city of 1934, while a quartet of ethnic Americans (including the Yankee incumbent) duke it out in a wild mayoral election. Generously observed, vividly drawn, and beautifully realized, the fictional city that he author evokes is a New Bedford to celebrate for all its faults-and to read about time and time again.”—Llewellyn Howland III, author of The New Bedford Yacht Club: A History
From the Book:
"Both comedic and comic, Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 gives us a full and generous picture of a time and place that now exist because of words on a page, populated by individualized characters and characteristic incidents. . . . As in Ernest Hemingway's stories about Nick Adams in In Our Time or Sherwood Anderson's about George Willard in Winesburg, Ohio, the boy-hero of Felix's book goes though a series of episodes that serve to shape his understanding of the nature of the world. . ." -- "From the Preface" by George Monteiro, Emeritus Professor, Brown University
- CHARLES REIS FELIX was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, one of four children to Portuguese immigrant parents. He attended local public schools and graduated from New Bedford High in 1941. He studied at the University of Michigan from 1941-43, at which time he was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war he received a B.A. in history from Stanford University, and became an elementary school teacher. He is married, with two grown children, and lives with his wife Barbara in a cabin among the redwoods of Northern California.
His first published book, Crossing the Sauer (Burford Books), an account of his experience as a combat infantryman in WWII, was hailed by Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory, as “one of the most honest, unforgettable memoirs of the war I’ve read.”
Felix published Through a Portagee Gate (U Massachusetts Dartmouth), a remarkably honest self-portrait and an endearing tribute to the author’s father, a Portuguese immigrant cobbler who came to America in 1915.
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Distant Music - Two Novels: The Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos
“Praise for The Gunnysack Castle by Julian Silva: ‘The rise of an anglicized Portuguese is chronicled in a weaving of many strands the immigrant experience, the place of women, the ambience of the nouveau riche that makes a voluptuous tapestry of life and richly satisfying first novel... This is a compelling novel of Portuguese assimilation into the American mainstream.”—Publisher's Weekly
Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but–even more important–he adumbrates the compromised morality of their achievement.
The Gunnysack Castle was first published by Ohio University Press in 1983. A study of the character of Belle Bettencourt was published by Cosmopolitan Magazine in March 1964.
The second section of The Death of Mae Ramos, "Vasco and the Other," was originally published in 1979 under a different title and in a slightly different form in the University of Colorado's Writer's Forum 6.
Reviews:
“... the women in the book are complex, vulnerable, proud, silly and wise; in other words, they are real people and their lives and their stories are affecting and memorable.”—San Jose Mercury News
Endorsements:
“A first novel with a ring of authenticity.”—The Fresno Bee
- JULIAN SILVA is a fourth-generation Portuguese-American whose Azorean ancestors first settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1870s. He was born in 1927 in san Lorenzo, which has served, with considerable license, as the model for the fictitious San Oriel.
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The Holyoke
An elegy to a lost world one peopled with fisherman, laborers, wives and mothers, all adhering, to one degree or another, to an Old-World Catholic way of life.
The Holyoke, out of print for several years and now reissued here in an entirely new edition, was the first collection of poems by one of America s distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. In this book Frank X. Gaspar establishes his landscape, his straightforward diction, his precise observation, and his loyalty to his roots qualities that are never abandoned but continue to develop throughout his later work. Taken as a whole, the book can be read as an elegy to a lost world one peopled with fisherman and laborers and wives and mothers, all adhering, to one degree or another, to an Old-World Catholic way of life. The men fish in the perilous North Atlantic waters. The old ones, the velhos and velhas, still speak in the old tongue and dream of the green hills of their Azorean homeland. That world has largely vanished, but it is not completely lost, for the poet keeps it alive, first in memory and then in art. First Snow is about the arrival of another mouth to feed, but it also details daily life in that unnamed fishing town. The mother sifts coal ashes from the parlor stove; the uncle splits kindling on the sidewalk. In other poems we see the family heating the house s bathwater stovetop in a copper tub, or the young protagonist diving for money thrown by tourists. But in each poem, no matter how everyday life is rendered, something deeper, something lying behind or beyond the everyday, is sought for: They reach into their pockets/and stars fall around you./You scoop them from the world/while the quiet longing/comes to you, aching deep/in the lobes of your chest. Longing, observing, wondering, marveling The Holyoke explores the small raptures and terrors, the jubilations and laments, of a life both profoundly sensed and gracefully examined.
Endorsements:
“Frank Gaspar’s poems are agile and forceful, their narratives are clear and absorbing, the collection does that difficult thing—it transcends its own total and becomes more than itself.”—Mary Oliver
- FRANK X. GASPAR is the author of four books of poetry—The Holyoke, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, A Field Guide to the Heavens and Night of a Thousand Blossoms—as well as the novel Leaving Pico (UPNE). His writing has won numerous awards and prizes, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the 1988 Morse Poetry Prize, the 1994 Anhinga Prize, the 1999 Brittingham Prize, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the California Book Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Gaspar’s work has appeared widely in magazines and journals throughout the country, and he has been included in multiple editions of the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from University of California, Irvine. He now lives in Southern California.
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Home Is an Island - A Novel
“Lewis’ style and quality of the narrative is most refreshing. Some of his descriptive passages, in the pellucid simplicity and rich imagery, ring with the lyricism of poetry.”—New York Times Book Review
On an island in the Azores, a young Portuguese boy comes of age, discovering love and literature before he departs for America
Originally published by Random House in 1951, Home Is an Island is an autobiographical novel about boyhood on the Azores during the early twentieth century. Set in the mid-Atlantic, halfway between Portugal and the United States, Home Is an Island captures the simple, pastoral life in a village of the Old World where the popular imagination is permeated by the wonders of America and its promise of wealth and opportunity. This book will appeal to readers interested in America in the literary imagination, island literature, Portuguese-American literature, and Diaspora studies.
Reviews:
“There is about this novel a fine, tender, sensitive, spiritual quality, a quietness and repose quite in keeping with the simple, honest and straightforward lives of the villagers. . . . Well recommended.”—Library Journal
“It is the kind of book that is delightful to read.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune
Endorsements:
“One does not often find a novel that reads like a poem, that tells a simple story in a simple prose, and yet is heroic, a novel of importance.”—Patricia Highsmith
From the Book:
“Lewis’ classic book remains relevant today. Home Is an Island says a lot about America and immigrants in the early twentieth century, and how they decided to come to America. It describes in countless ways how Azoreans viewed themselves as Americans long before they left the Azores.”—Congressman Devin Nunes, From the Foreword
- ALFRED LEWIS (1902–1977), born on the mid-Atlantic island of Flores, immigrated to California in 1922. Having learned English only after arriving in America, he went on to study law and became a municipal judge in the San Joaquin Valley. Lewis was the first Portuguese-American writing from an ethnic perspective to claim the attention of the general reading public. He is the author of Sixty Acres and a Barn: A Novel.
Almost Gone
“Sousa manages to make almost every story a stand-alone piece, while constructing a whole that feels, in the end, like an exquisitely rendered novel.”—SansSerif.com
Alternately gritty, suspenseful, and illuminating, Brian Sousa’s debut collection of interlocking stories depicts the Portuguese American experience from a new perspective
Brian Sousa leaves sentiment and saudade behind in Almost Gone, a linked collection spanning four generations of a Portuguese immigrant family. In this hardscrabble world, the youth struggle with the secrets left behind by their elders, as their parents fought through the pain and joy of assimilation. Told through various perspectives, Almost Gone is a working-class tale of survival that finds no easy answers, but cuts straight to the bone.
Endorsements:
“Almost Gone is an evocative, sensual journey that carries us from Portugal to America, by way of the human heart.”—Lise Haines, author of Girl in the Arena, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, and In My Sister's Country
“The deceptively straightforward stories of Almost Gone sneak up to unfold in every direction, across distance and generations, as in raw-edged, pared-down lyricism Brian Sousa reveals a humming web of tragedy and wonder staked across the sprawling networks of modern life. In his resonant overlapping of characters losing and finding themselves he works magic, revealing those timeless in-between spaces where life—and art—mean the most.” —Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade
- BRIAN SOUSA’s stories and poems have been published in various journals and anthologies. He teaches writing at Boston College.
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Another City upon a Hill - A New England Memoir
A searching portrait of a city battered by the collapse of the textile industry woven into a spirited coming of age story
This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti’s world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
Endorsements:
“An expert historian’s wonderfully honest memoir of growing up in Fall River, ‘the city of hills, mills, and dinner pails.’ It’s an authentic American story, beautifully told.” —Gordon S. Wood, Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution
“Conforti has written a marvelously engaging memoir of self-discovery and the making of a historian. By exploring and coming to terms with his roots in a New England mill city, he tells a story that is quintessentially American. Always aware of context, from his boyhood in Fall River in the 1950s to his young adulthood in the 1970s, Conforti treats the reader to often brilliant and sometimes humorous insight into the ethnic cultures of New England, its industrial and Yankee past, its post-industrial present, and its sometimes seedy politics.” —Ron Formisano, author of The Tea Party: A Brief History and Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
- JOSEPH A. CONFORTI is Distinguished Professor of American and New England Studies Emeritus at University of Southern Maine. He is the author of five books, including Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America and the acclaimed Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-twentieth Century.
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Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States - Arguments about History, Culture, and Transnational Connections
An intriguing comparison of identity formation among Portuguese immigrants from the Azores Islands and their descendants in Brazil and the U.S.
This comparative investigation of Azorean identity formation in southern Brazil and southeastern New England explores how immigrants and their descendants actively create local, national, and transnational connections and discourses of belonging. These two outposts of the Azorean diaspora have very different settlement histories: the Azorean settlement of Santa Catarina dates back to the mid-18th century and has not been augmented by any new immigration for over 250 years; Azorean emigration to southeastern New England is largely a 19th and 20th century phenomenon that has led to the formation of large ethnic communities. The surprise at the heart of this book is that despite these very different immigration histories, collective interest in Azorean culture and public manifestations of Azoreanness are quite prominent in both places. The contrasts between these two very differently situated identity narratives offer insight into the variable and sometimes rather counter-intuitive processes of ethnic formation. These findings are pertinent to debates about the nature of ethnic identity and transnational communities.
Endorsements:
“Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States offers an insightful and rich ethnographic comparison of how identities are formed and transformed among Azoreans in New England and Brazil. The book touches on a host of questions of critical concern in contemporary immigration studies: transnationalism, the second generation, ethnicity, and the politics of culture.”—Caroline Brettell, Southern Methodist University
“Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States offers a rare, multi-sited portrayal of immigration and expressive culture focused on two hot spots of Azorean settlement. This is a fascinating comparative study and an important ethnography for scholars of Lusophone culture.”—Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Rutgers University
- JOĆO LEAL, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon, has written extensively on Portuguese culture and history.
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Community, Culture and The Makings of Identity - Portuguese-Americans along the Eastern Seaboard
Offers insight into the histories, cultures, and social dynamics of Portuguese and other Lusophone and Luso-African of the northeastern seaboard of the U.S.
Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity brings together explorations of Portuguese as well as other Lusophone and Luso-African populations that have settled in the immigrant hubs of the port cities and towns along the Northeastern seaboard of the U.S. The contributing scholars offer insight from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives into the histories, cultures, and intertwined social dynamics of these immigrant communities. The still understudied Portuguese-American story — which includes multiple waves of immigration that span two centuries, ongoing connections with a global diaspora, and complex relationships with post-colonial populations — has much to offer to our understandings of transnational migration and subsequent processes of identity and community formation among immigrants and their descents.
The contributors to this collection attend to questions about the meanings of citizenship and forms of national belonging; the role of expressive culture and media representations in process of identity formation; the factors shaping trajectories of social mobility and political representation; the complexly interconnected dynamics of work, gender and family in the immigrant context; and the formulations of racial and minority identities in this corner of the Portuguese disapora. The ethnographic richness and productive interplay of the contributions in this volume point to a whole array of new and as yet unexplored questions regarding the Portuguese-American and other interconnected communities.
- KIMBERLY DACOSTA HOLTON is Associate Professor and Director of the Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies Program at Rutgers University. ANDREA KLIMT is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
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The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales
"For any lover of fairy tales and questioner of life beyond the grave, this compilation is an absolute joy, flawless in both selection and delivery."—San Francisco and Sacramento Book Review
Inspired by the beauty and magic of the Azorean archipelago, this collection transports readers from the natural to the supernatural
Born from the fertile volcanic soil and the sea and mists surrounding the Azorean islands, the characters who inhabit these stories blend realism with magic. Like the nine Muses, each island has its own special attributes. Whether searching for love, power, or meaning, these characters are subject to the whims of Fate and Fortune. Here the commonplace present confronts forces both natural and supernatural. In the Azorean microcosm, they come to represent a far larger sphere, embodying the foibles and idiosyncrasies of humanity the world over.
- DARRELL KASTIN was born in Los Angeles, the son of an Azorean mother and a father of Russian/Jewish descent. His novel, The Undiscovered Island, won the 2010 IPPY Independent Publisher's Silver Award for Multicultural Fiction. He is also a musician and a composer.
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Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934
A comedic portrait of Portuguese American life during the Great Depression
Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is the story of an election for mayor in a Massachusetts mill town in 1934 as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Portuguese boy, Seraphin. The incumbent, a Yankee, is challenged by candidates from five different ethnic groups–Irish, French Canadian, Polish, Portuguese, and Jewish. A portrait of each candidate is subtly drawn and we meet campaign workers like Teddy, who has enlisted to help secure a teaching position for his daughter, and Jimmy, a numbers runner who proudly passes out cards announcing his appointment as Assistant Campaign Manager, North End.
But the novel is more than just the story of an election. The specter of the Depression hovers over every scene. Laura, Seraphin’s big sister, describes her job as a fruit-store clerk in every excruciatingly painful detail. And the allure of America is always present for Seraphin in his desire and longing to lead an American life. America also affects the remarkable Secundo B. Alves, the Portuguese candidate. Secundo’s memories of the Azores are honest, authentic, and touching. But when he is defeated in the primary, he quickly bounces back as a supporter of the Frenchman’s candidacy and rewrites his Vasco da Gama imagery. Secundo is showing the adaptability it takes to succeed in America. Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is a valuable historical document and an artistic triumph.
Endorsements:
“‘The Portuguese are the unknown people,’ declaims Secundo Alves. ‘To be Portuguese in America is to be a stone dropped in the middle of the ocean.’ Alves, one of Charles Reis Felix’s colorful and memorable characters, may be overstating the case, but not by much. And Reis Felix, in his novel of vignettes, brings the Portuguese to life with wit and humor, and above all, with an eye for telling detail that any American writer-of any ethnicity-should envy. This book captures the nature of immigrant New Bedford in a way that will make it relevant and entertaining reading for decades to come!”—Frank X. Gaspar, author of Leaving Pico
“The cotton mills of New Bedford have long since followed its whaling fleet into oblivion. Gone the ugly labor disputes and turf wars that once dominated the region’s headlines. Dead the mill owners and operatives who spun gold from cotton. But by a literary miracle, not everyone who was witness to New Bedford’s decline and fall has forgotten it. In his wonderful new novel, the octogenarian writer (and New Bedford native) Charles Reis Felix tells what it was like to be young and proud and poor and Portuguese in the city of 1934, while a quartet of ethnic Americans (including the Yankee incumbent) duke it out in a wild mayoral election. Generously observed, vividly drawn, and beautifully realized, the fictional city that he author evokes is a New Bedford to celebrate for all its faults-and to read about time and time again.”—Llewellyn Howland III, author of The New Bedford Yacht Club: A History
From the Book:
"Both comedic and comic, Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 gives us a full and generous picture of a time and place that now exist because of words on a page, populated by individualized characters and characteristic incidents. . . . As in Ernest Hemingway's stories about Nick Adams in In Our Time or Sherwood Anderson's about George Willard in Winesburg, Ohio, the boy-hero of Felix's book goes though a series of episodes that serve to shape his understanding of the nature of the world. . ." -- "From the Preface" by George Monteiro, Emeritus Professor, Brown University
- CHARLES REIS FELIX was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, one of four children to Portuguese immigrant parents. He attended local public schools and graduated from New Bedford High in 1941. He studied at the University of Michigan from 1941-43, at which time he was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war he received a B.A. in history from Stanford University, and became an elementary school teacher. He is married, with two grown children, and lives with his wife Barbara in a cabin among the redwoods of Northern California.
His first published book, Crossing the Sauer (Burford Books), an account of his experience as a combat infantryman in WWII, was hailed by Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory, as “one of the most honest, unforgettable memoirs of the war I’ve read.”
Felix published Through a Portagee Gate (U Massachusetts Dartmouth), a remarkably honest self-portrait and an endearing tribute to the author’s father, a Portuguese immigrant cobbler who came to America in 1915.
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Distant Music - Two Novels: The Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos
“Praise for The Gunnysack Castle by Julian Silva: ‘The rise of an anglicized Portuguese is chronicled in a weaving of many strands the immigrant experience, the place of women, the ambience of the nouveau riche that makes a voluptuous tapestry of life and richly satisfying first novel... This is a compelling novel of Portuguese assimilation into the American mainstream.”—Publisher's Weekly
Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but–even more important–he adumbrates the compromised morality of their achievement.
The Gunnysack Castle was first published by Ohio University Press in 1983. A study of the character of Belle Bettencourt was published by Cosmopolitan Magazine in March 1964.
The second section of The Death of Mae Ramos, "Vasco and the Other," was originally published in 1979 under a different title and in a slightly different form in the University of Colorado's Writer's Forum 6.
Reviews:
“... the women in the book are complex, vulnerable, proud, silly and wise; in other words, they are real people and their lives and their stories are affecting and memorable.”—San Jose Mercury News
Endorsements:
“A first novel with a ring of authenticity.”—The Fresno Bee
- JULIAN SILVA is a fourth-generation Portuguese-American whose Azorean ancestors first settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1870s. He was born in 1927 in san Lorenzo, which has served, with considerable license, as the model for the fictitious San Oriel.
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The Holyoke
An elegy to a lost world one peopled with fisherman, laborers, wives and mothers, all adhering, to one degree or another, to an Old-World Catholic way of life.
The Holyoke, out of print for several years and now reissued here in an entirely new edition, was the first collection of poems by one of America s distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. In this book Frank X. Gaspar establishes his landscape, his straightforward diction, his precise observation, and his loyalty to his roots qualities that are never abandoned but continue to develop throughout his later work. Taken as a whole, the book can be read as an elegy to a lost world one peopled with fisherman and laborers and wives and mothers, all adhering, to one degree or another, to an Old-World Catholic way of life. The men fish in the perilous North Atlantic waters. The old ones, the velhos and velhas, still speak in the old tongue and dream of the green hills of their Azorean homeland. That world has largely vanished, but it is not completely lost, for the poet keeps it alive, first in memory and then in art. First Snow is about the arrival of another mouth to feed, but it also details daily life in that unnamed fishing town. The mother sifts coal ashes from the parlor stove; the uncle splits kindling on the sidewalk. In other poems we see the family heating the house s bathwater stovetop in a copper tub, or the young protagonist diving for money thrown by tourists. But in each poem, no matter how everyday life is rendered, something deeper, something lying behind or beyond the everyday, is sought for: They reach into their pockets/and stars fall around you./You scoop them from the world/while the quiet longing/comes to you, aching deep/in the lobes of your chest. Longing, observing, wondering, marveling The Holyoke explores the small raptures and terrors, the jubilations and laments, of a life both profoundly sensed and gracefully examined.
Endorsements:
“Frank Gaspar’s poems are agile and forceful, their narratives are clear and absorbing, the collection does that difficult thing—it transcends its own total and becomes more than itself.”—Mary Oliver
- FRANK X. GASPAR is the author of four books of poetry—The Holyoke, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, A Field Guide to the Heavens and Night of a Thousand Blossoms—as well as the novel Leaving Pico (UPNE). His writing has won numerous awards and prizes, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the 1988 Morse Poetry Prize, the 1994 Anhinga Prize, the 1999 Brittingham Prize, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the California Book Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Gaspar’s work has appeared widely in magazines and journals throughout the country, and he has been included in multiple editions of the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from University of California, Irvine. He now lives in Southern California.
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Home Is an Island - A Novel
“Lewis’ style and quality of the narrative is most refreshing. Some of his descriptive passages, in the pellucid simplicity and rich imagery, ring with the lyricism of poetry.”—New York Times Book Review
On an island in the Azores, a young Portuguese boy comes of age, discovering love and literature before he departs for America
Originally published by Random House in 1951, Home Is an Island is an autobiographical novel about boyhood on the Azores during the early twentieth century. Set in the mid-Atlantic, halfway between Portugal and the United States, Home Is an Island captures the simple, pastoral life in a village of the Old World where the popular imagination is permeated by the wonders of America and its promise of wealth and opportunity. This book will appeal to readers interested in America in the literary imagination, island literature, Portuguese-American literature, and Diaspora studies.
Reviews:
“There is about this novel a fine, tender, sensitive, spiritual quality, a quietness and repose quite in keeping with the simple, honest and straightforward lives of the villagers. . . . Well recommended.”—Library Journal
“It is the kind of book that is delightful to read.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune
Endorsements:
“One does not often find a novel that reads like a poem, that tells a simple story in a simple prose, and yet is heroic, a novel of importance.”—Patricia Highsmith
From the Book:
“Lewis’ classic book remains relevant today. Home Is an Island says a lot about America and immigrants in the early twentieth century, and how they decided to come to America. It describes in countless ways how Azoreans viewed themselves as Americans long before they left the Azores.”—Congressman Devin Nunes, From the Foreword
- ALFRED LEWIS (1902–1977), born on the mid-Atlantic island of Flores, immigrated to California in 1922. Having learned English only after arriving in America, he went on to study law and became a municipal judge in the San Joaquin Valley. Lewis was the first Portuguese-American writing from an ethnic perspective to claim the attention of the general reading public. He is the author of Sixty Acres and a Barn: A Novel.