<DIV>In Martin Rowson's <i>The Waste Land</i>, private detective Chris Marlowe is tasked with getting to the bottom of the most impenetrable of all modernist mysteries: namely T. S. Eliot's <i>The Wasteland</i>. Cunningly contrived, this irreverent graphic parody is inspired in equal parts by the classic modernist poem and by the American noir novels of Raymond Chandler.</div><div> </div><div>Marlowe, searching for his dead partner's killers, is lured into a web of murder, deceit, lust, despair and, of course, a frantic quest for the Holy Grail. Doped, duped, pistol-whipped, framed by the cops and going nowhere fast, Marlowe enters a nightmare world where Robert Frost, Norman Mailer and Edmund Wilson drink in the gloom of a London pub; where Auden is glimpsed entering the men's room; where Henry James, Aldous Huxley and Richard Wagner share an ice cream aboard a Thames pleasure steamer; and where, out of luck and out of clues, Marlowe finally tracks down T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.</div><div> </div><div>Available now for the first time in a decade, this is an unforgettably strange trip through modern literature with one of Britain's best of writers and illustrators.</div>