Lee

By Tito Perdue

Book Overview

After an absence of several decades, the aging and curmudgeonly Leland Pefley returns to his hometown to find that nothing is as he remembers it, and everything has gone to the dogs. Armed with nothing but a cane to ward away vice and to impose decorum and justice on the insolent decadence of his times, the erudite Lee sets out on a desperate quest to find a shred of intelligence in his contemporaries, prepared to beat it out of them if necessary. Propelled thence on a series of unlikely adventures, he finds himself at the heart of a story pitting nostalgia against modernity and the old against the new, in a scathing commentary on the decline of our society, and a hilarious and anguishing tale of an old man walking arm-in-arm with death.

The first edition of Lee was published in 1991 by Four Walls Eight Windows, and received excellent reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader and The New England Review of Books. The second edition was published in 2007 by Penguin. This is the third edition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1912975289
• ISBN13: 9781912975280
• Release Date: December 2021
• Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Unforgettable character!

I read LEE years ago and loved it. The character Lee Pefley is engaging, sometimes ridiculously anti-social and also hilarious. After completing Perdue's latest novel, Fields of Asphodel, I felt compelled to return to Lee, and found it even better on second reading. I noticed this time subtleties in Perdue's use of language that I had missed the first time. Perdue's Lee Pefley is an unforgettable character. In the years between readings he stayed with me, as did many of Perdue's descriptions.Fields of Asphodel

a dark gem

In Leeland Pefley, Tito Perdue creates the classic Misanthrope with a Cause. America, Lee perceives, is in a state of decline and degeneration, her population not just unwashed, but uneducated and imbecilic. Lee - a man too well educated (largely SELF-educated by way of his cherished, numerous, stolen books) to endure the idiocy that surrounds him - is recently widowed and wants to leave the planet himself. How Perdue makes this hilarious is a wonder. Though not a fan of violence usually, I laughed out loud as Lee strikes out with his club-like wood walking stick at those he deems too stupid to live.

One of our best living writers

If Lee weren't a fictional character, he would have clocked that bird-brained reviewer from Publisher's Weekly who panned this book. LEE is a modern masterpiece, only I'm not sure America deserves it. Buy this book and read it-- it's really hardcore. Buy it for your friends. Watch the movie IDIOCRACY by Mike Judge and then read LEE.

A TRULY GREAT BOOK!

Maybe--just MAYBE--if you could harness the linguinsic magic of Marquez and Faulkner and Proulx, you might conjure a likeness to Tito Perdue. LEE's attack on the senses is like standing in a storm following a heatwave.