Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture
Tito Perdue
Brent, Alabama: Standard American Publishing Co., 2023
204 pages
First published in 1994, Tito Perdue’s Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture returns from Standard American Publishing.
About Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture
This is the story of Benjamin Reuben, a junior member of a large and highly uneducated family lodged in one of the more sterile regions of Alabama. Before the Great War (1914–1918), he acquired a woman and a parcel of farmland through forced marriage. Adept at nothing but spelling, blessed and burdened by a poetic imagination but starved of culture, the young insomniac toiled sedulously for years, doing most of his plowing at night. Finally, to save his farm, he became a rural postman. At last in old age he and the woman drifted on down to the Edge of the world, a small distance from their tattered house. He died thinking himself a failure by worldly reckoning, overlooking his six children and growing brood of grandchildren, including one Lee Pefley, the preceptor of another Reuben who was destined to turn the world around.
Praise for Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture
“Imagine if Robinson Jeffers and Gabriel García Márquez teamed up to write a Flannery O’Connor novel and you’ll get a taste of what awaits you in the pages of Tito Perdue’s Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture. This is Perdue’s most poetic novel. Full of violence and humor, it is the song of a life in the whirlwind of a world that is beautiful and better than beautiful, not moral but better than moral—indeed, the word is sublime.”
—Greg Johnson, author of The Trial of Socrates
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 The New Austerities (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013), Reuben (2014), 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.