Kirjahaku

Arrogance and romance 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.The boy, preternaturally brilliant, is not in love with life. He chooses solitude so as not to have to compromise with friends (he hasn't any) or colleagues. Value, he believes, derives solely from the mind and imagination, though he is too young, of course, to have developed a full philosophy. He abhors capitalist practice and strives for self-sufficiency at the price of poverty.Their brief and explosive affair approaches transcendence.

Tito Perdue's Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Shall 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.

Tito Perdue's Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Shall 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.

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."It happens more than just sometimes that overly refined persons like thee and me may opt to turn away from ordinary things and seek entry into a more perfect world than this one. I'm thinking about art galleries, concert halls, coin and stamp collections, ingenious mechanical devices or a well-played chess match. People like you spend too much time gazing at the stars while others, like my good friend who offers us a case study of the type, has traded away his life in a still-continuing struggle to assemble a non-representative array of the world's most beautiful postage stamps. A little custodial 'art gallery, ' he calls it, his own bespoken domain after three failed marriages and a deleterious son. All the elements, I've been told, can be found in a single drop of sea water. So, too, with a choice collection of the world's postage brought together for aesthetic purposes. Thus my friend. One doesn't need to be a good person, remember, to be extraordinarily interesting anyway."--From the author

"It happens more than just sometimes that overly refined persons like thee and me may opt to turn away from ordinary things and seek entry into a more perfect world than this one. I'm thinking about art galleries, concert halls, coin and stamp collections, ingenious mechanical devices or a well-played chess match. People like you spend too much time gazing at the stars while others, like my good friend who offers us a case study of the type, has traded away his life in a still-continuing struggle to assemble a non-representative array of the world's most beautiful postage stamps. A little custodial 'art gallery, ' he calls it, his own bespoken domain after three failed marriages and a deleterious son. All the elements, I've been told, can be found in a single drop of sea water. So, too, with a choice collection of the world's postage brought together for aesthetic purposes. Thus my friend. One doesn't need to be a good person, remember, to be extraordinarily interesting anyway."--From the author

This, the third volume in Tito Perdue's tetralogy, pulls the reader further into Young Albert Pefley's narrative, following his nascent career in engineering and many high-risk detours along the way. We follow Albert through his studies at the academy, where he finds professional favor, love, and a talent for boxing, up to New York and prestigious employment. But his soul lies in the South, and before long the Yankee lifestyle makes him hanker for the simple pleasures of William's house. The future is never simple for Albert however, and before long he finds himself chasing a dream on the Pacific, where many have tried their luck but few carry it through. A sweeping tale of youth's optimism and heartfelt values, The Engineer spans the breadth of a continent and put's Albert's determination to the greatest test so far... Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama who was working there at the time. The family returned to Alabama in 1941. 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. 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. Since then he has published ten other novels, including Morning Crafts (2013), which was also published by Arktos. In 2015 he was awarded the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature. Spanning two generations, the William's House tetralogy chronicles the rise of the Pefleys in Alabama across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The struggles of father William Pefley and his wife Deborah against poverty, disease, and their own expectations are charted through the birth of their four sons and their varying destinies. Each one of these sons find themselves in positions beyond their father's expectation or influence, however it is in Young Albert that the story finds its grandest expression, and in which an emerging industrial America is symbolized through his entrepreneurial adventures and exotic travels. As control of their fate passes from father to son, the brothers find themselves in a world which is in transition, in which the Georgia that gave them their first memories is changing beyond recognition and can no longer hold them. But the call of family and memory always calls them home, back to William's house, where they first saw daylight.

The final installment in Tito Perdue's William's House tour de force, The Bachelor continues to chart young Albert Pefley's journey to manhood, this time across sea crossings and in a foreign land. Having secured work with an exotic engineering firm in Chile, Albert endures an endless voyage and a drastic culture shock, in time winning the respect not only of his colleagues, but of a wealthy family and, even more importantly, their daughter. Albert must finally decide where his loyalties lie, if his heart belongs in the mountains and gardens of dusky Chile, or in the sweet tea rhythms of his beloved Alabama, where his mother grows older each day. Material success or maintaining the hearth: this is the dilemma that lies at the heart of Albert's journey.