First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s The New Austerities returns from Standard American Publishing.

First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture returns from Standard American Publishing.

Under the tutelage of Lee Pefley, Reuben learned what must be done. And when the time came, he left Alabama and took up the task of conquering the world, or at least the Occidental share of it. This novel chronicles Reuben’s necessary, great, and terrible deeds.

Really, how can human beings ever hope for transcendence while still attached to physical bodies, unsightly paraphernalia hindered by illnesses, old age, economic requirements and the rest. How much better if the best of us, you and me, were transposed into everlasting equipment able to separate the spiritual from the chaff!

He had a telescope in fixed position, a half-dozen semi-domesticated pet raccoons, and a trove of alcoholic beverages. Had other things, including the normal pots and pans, drinking vessels, a .357 magnum 8-shot Smith and Wesson revolver and, at great expense, a battery driven water purification distillery fed from the nearby creek. Had nine dark suits of various weights and shades of blue. He also owned a supply of mysterious-looking ties ordered from the Duchamp Company in London, England. Dressed thus, no one bothered him or suspected the sort of person that he was.

When an individual or a whole race becomes aware of its impending doom, atavistic things happen. This is the story of a cartel of some two score of resolute but highly idiosyncratic men resolved to reset post-modern American society. Septuagenarians and older, unafraid of death and even hungering for it, they have pooled their talents and funds to change the course of history. Then they squander it all in a single act of suicidal violence. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“One of the drollest and most inspired creations of Tito Perdue’s imagination is the ‘escrubilator,’ a piece of technology whose multifarious features and functions make it as impossible for the reader to visualize as Gogol’s nose that abandoned its owner and left town disguised as a civil servant. Tito Perdue’s nineteenth novel, The Gizmo, tells t

“Chances are, there’s more smut in the mind of the average reader than in the pages Tito Perdue’s The Smut Book. This is a gently wry novel about a pre-teen boy’s awakening interest in the opposite sex, set in 1950 in a small Alabama town. It is a world in which healthy youngsters grow up fast, barely contained by close families, hovering teachers,

Tito Perdue’s The Philatelist is a novella about the joys of stamp collecting as a refuge from an unhappy life. The Philatelist is paired with the short story “Good Things in Tiny Places,” read on the occasion of the author receiving the 2015 H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.

Tito Perdue’s Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come is a novella about the advancement of American civilization as revealed by the sixtieth high school reunion of the Class of 1956 from a small Alabama town. The narrator sardonically catalogs the “progress” of his classmates in terms of divorces, abortions, addictions, suicides, arrests, and sex change operations, which progressive thinkers tend to regard as negligible epiphenomena of long-overdue revolutionary advances in social justice and self-actualization. This is a book for those who are not quite ready to celebrate the end of history just yet.

Cynosura is a feverish love story between a non-ordinary Tennessee farm girl of supernal physical beauty and an estranged youth possessed of exceptional intellectual ambition. The girl, a gifted and hard-working cellist, is a natural-born elitist, contemptuous, or anyway indifferent, to ordinary people. Her self-selected life’s mission is to identify the man to whom she will want to consecrate her life. She is sexual, intelligent, melancholy, efficient, and intuits that her life will be short.

Welcome to the future. The 21st century has come of age, and it seems that everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Propelled beyond the brink by environmental catastrophe, by social degeneration and the foretold collapse of the monetary system, the American landscape has given way to a postmodern picaresque. In such a world, where crime has been normalized, sex has been mechanized, and where ethnic enclaves – equipped with inscrutable bioengineered surveillance gadgetry – vie for the last remnants of power, one hapless pilgrim stands athwart the apocalyptic tide. Emboldened by dim nostalgia and quixotic resolve, this man – our hero, as we may insist – is entrusted to mobilize a fractious retinue of co-ethnic subversives (the maligned “Cauks”) to establish a stronghold, a redoubt, a community, a last ditch . . . a Node. It remains only to be seen whether the seeds of renewal may yet find purchase, or be left to ash.