T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was first published in 1922, in the aftermath of a world war and global pandemic. It has been translated into some 35 languages. Berkshire Publishing Group's centenary edition includes, in addition to the title poem, a number of Eliot's best-known early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," "The Boston Evening Transcript," "La Figlia che Piange," and "The Hollow Men." The design is based on both the original Hogarth Press edition, produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and the American Boni & Liveright design. In his foreword, internationally acclaimed novelist and translator Qiu Xiaolong explains how he came, as a student in China, to love Eliot's poetry and what it has meant, and means today, to readers around the world.

"I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages . . . acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential." ?T. S. Eliot

"The protagonist in my Inspector Chen series turned out to be an honest cop working under the omnipresent surveillance of the regime while still trying hard to keep some distance as an independent-thinking intellectual. He frequently quotes or paraphrases Eliot's lines, which help to give him an alternative, humane perspective in spite of that suffocating system." ?QIU Xiaolong