Reuben
Tito Perdue
Brent, Alabama: Standard American Publishing, 2022
170 pages
Second Edition
About Reuben
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.
“Reuben is my favorite Tito Perdue novel. Reuben is a satirical meditation on the fallen state of white America and how a white vanguard might be organized to turn the world around. The story begins when a thug named Reuben chances upon a teacher, Tito Perdue’s alter ego Lee Pefley, who fashions him into a cultured thug and a man of destiny. Reuben is a masterful piece of writing, moving effortlessly between mythic, epic, and satirical modes. It is also highly entertaining and thought-provoking, with biting humor and arresting turns of phrase on every page.”
—Greg Johnson, author of The Year America Died
“The unforgettable character of Lee Pefley embodies a paradox that some of those who seem by today’s standards to be the most acerbic, the most misanthropic, the most irrelevant and out of touch may secretly be the greatest idealists of all.”
—Derek Turner, The Quarterly Review
About the Author
Tito Perdue is the author of twenty-three novels, including Lee (1991), The New Austerities (1994), Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013), the William’s House quartet (2016), Cynosura (2017), Philip (2017), The Bent Pyramid (2018), Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come (2018), The Philatelist (2018), The Smut Book (2018), The Gizmo (2019), Love Song of the Australopiths (2020), Materials for All Future Historians (2020), and Vade Mecum (2021). In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.
Also by Tito Perdue
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2023 - 232 pages
Tito Perdue
The New Austerities
First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s The New Austerities returns from Standard American Publishing.
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2023 - 204 pages
Tito Perdue
Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture
First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture returns from Standard American Publishing.
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2023 - 218 pages
Tito Perdue
Fields of Asphodel
First published in 2007, Tito Perdue’s Fields of Asphodel returns from Standard American Publishing.
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2021 - 106 pages
Tito Perdue
Vade Mecum
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!
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2020 - 184 pages
Tito Perdue
Materials for All Future Historians
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.
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2020 - 132 pages
Tito Perdue
Love Song of the Australopiths
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.
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2019 - 156 pages
Tito Perdue
The Gizmo
“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
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2020 - 204 pages
Tito Perdue
The Smut Book
“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,
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2017 - 100 pages
Tito Perdue
The Philatelist
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.
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2017 - 104 pages
Tito Perdue
Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come
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.
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2016 - 190 pages
Tito Perdue
Cynosura
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.
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2014 - 296 pages
Tito Perdue
Reuben
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 is a chronicling of Reuben’s necessary, great, and terrible deeds. “Tito Perdue’s latest novel, Reuben, continues in the tradition of his novel The Node. Reuben is a satirical meditation on the fallen state of white America and how a white vanguard might be organized to turn the world around. Reuben is highly entertaining and thought-provoking, with biting humor and arresting turns of phrase on every page.”—Greg Johnson
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2011 - 258 pages
Tito Perdue
The Node
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.
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1994 - 218 pages
Tito Perdue
The New Austerities
“The New Austerities continues Tito Perdue’s saga of his alter ego: librophile, insomniac, and misanthrope Lee Pefley. The book begins with Lee and his wife Judy, now in middle age, living in New York City, where they have had their fill of crime, decadence, and alienation. So with their life’s savings, a pistol, and a large collection of classical music and pilfered books, Lee and Judy depart New York bound for Lee’s ancestral home in Alabama, which promises a more human existence for the trivial price of a few I-told-you-sos. The New Austerities is a surreal, sardonic journey through the cultural wasteland and political chaos of post-modern America, but it proves that with a certain about of luck — and a modicum of ruthlessness and guile — you can go home again. This is a very entertaining and yet deeply moving book.” — Greg Johnson, author of New Right vs. Old Right
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2013 - 166 pages
Tito Perdue
Morning Crafts
Thirteen-year-old Leland Pefley was minding his own business, enjoying a day’s fishing near his father’s farm in Tennessee, when the odd, well-dressed and well-spoken man from the city appeared, inviting Lee to accompany him to a more interesting place. Out of curiosity, Lee followed him, and found himself hustled off to a strange, rustic academy in the wilderness with a group of other boys, all of whom had been semi-abducted as he himself had been.