The New Austerities
Tito Perdue
Brent, Alabama: Standard American Publishing Co., 2023
232 pages
First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s The New Austerities returns from Standard American Publishing.
About 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 amount of luck — and a modicum of ruthlessness and guile — you can go home again. The New Austerities is by turns poetic and droll, surreal and deeply moving.”
— Greg Johnson, author of Against Imperialism
About the Author
Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama. The family returned to Alabama in 1941, where Tito graduated from the Indian Springs School, a private academy near Birmingham, in 1956. He then attended Antioch College in Ohio for a year, before being expelled for cohabitating with a female student, Judy Clark. In 1957, they were married, and remain so today. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, and spent some time working in New York City, an experience which garnered him his life-long hatred of urban life. After holding positions at various university libraries, Tito has devoted himself full-time to writing since 1983.
His first novel, 1991’s Lee, received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader, and The New England Review of Books. In addition to the present volume, his novels include Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994; second edition, 2023), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007; second edition, 2023), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013), Reuben (2014; second edition, 2022), the William’s House quartet (2016), Cynosura (2017), Philip (2017), Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come (2018), The Bent Pyramid (2018), The Philatelist (2018), The Smut Book (2018), The Gizmo (2019), Love Song of the Australopiths (2020), Materials for All Future Historians (2020), Journey to a Location (2021), and Vade Mecum (2021)—which have been praised in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, The Quarterly Review, The Occidental Observer, and at Counter-Currents.
In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.