Overview

In Day After the Waste Land, Will Averill transforms T.S. Eliot's modernist epic into a Midwestern fever dream. Lawrence, Kansas becomes the new ""Unreal City""-where basketball courts replace chessboards, dive bars hum with verse, and local legends collide with pop culture. Not parody but echo, this is Eliot refracted through the cracked mirror of small-town America: part homage, part reinvention. With annotations, wit, and razor-sharp imagery, Averill stitches fragments of history, culture, and memory into something both intimate and universal. Equal parts poem and pop-art collage, Day After the Waste Land explores loss, identity, and belonging through the rhythms of Midwest life, capturing the strange beauty of a city that is at once ordinary and mythical. This is a striking remix of a timeless masterpiece-inviting readers to discover their own fragments in its pages.

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9781960462657

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR: DAY AFTER THE WASTE LAND Will Averill's beloved hometown of Lawrence, Kansas sets the stage for his reimagining of T.S. Eliot's poem, riffing on the poet's themes of disillusionment and cultural fragmentation with acerbic wit, obscure histories, and unflinching reflections on the city's past and present. Paired with Kent Smith's lively, color and black-and-white on-location sketches, the book is a tonal paradox-part love letter, part fever dream-infused with the sour-sweet stink of a barroom hangover. A must-have for any pop culture connoisseur of this iconic college town.-STJ. Stephen T. Johnson, artist and author of original award-winning children's books such as ""Alphabet City,"" a Caldecott Honor Book and New York Times Best Illustrated book of the year ""Will Averiill's The Day After the Waste Land combines a comic's use of satire to highlight hypocrisy with an insider's love and knowledge about his beloved hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. With an excellent introduction, embedded footnotes and marginal asides, illustrated by Kent Smith's brilliant artwork, this graphic epic is a gem."" -Jeffrey Ann Goudie is an award-winning freelance writer and book critic Lawrence, Kansas, worthy of the final days of Williams S. Burroughs, is a strange, singular, and wonderful place-haunted by history and hoops. In Day After the Wasateland, Will Averill delivers on the impossible: an ode to Lawrence that is so masterfully observed, hilariously sharp, profanely loving, and devastatingly lyrical, you will come to know it to its complicated and contradictory soul within the space of its pages. -Jeff Zentner, award-winning author of The Serpent King ...a pitch-perfect tribute to Andy Morton, and a skeleton key to Lawrence townie references overheard at the Jet Lag. Profane, but undeniably good-hearted...and full of love (and fond exasperation) for both Eliot and Lawrence (censored) Kansas."" -Laura Lorson, radio broadcaster and T.S. Eliot stan Nothing haunts a townie like bars and restaurants gone and remembered, friends loved and lost, old history turned to ceremony-and Averill's poem is beautifully haunted, even as it's laugh-out-loud funny. It is also incisive about Lawrence's contradictions and looks at the many different layers of time and history shading our city, examining-with love-the good and bad that make this such a singular place to live. Kent Smith's drawings elevate the whole operation greatly, adding so much texture and detail to a work already vivid."" -Chance Dibben, Writer, photographer, music-maker, co-presenter of VOLTA: A Replay Reading Series At once a haunting pilgrimage through capricious memory and detached nostalgia, and a meticulous lens on the stark beauty of quotidian life."" -Andy Bennett, poet Will Averill, inspired by T.S. Eliot's ""The Waste Land,"" goes well beyond parody and reworking to create a masterfully-written poem, a completely imagined world, from London to Lawrence, from 1922 to 2025. Wonderfully illustrated and playfully annotated, Day After the Waste Land is reverent and irreverent, entertaining and unsavory (at times), and always enlightening. Here's a ""LAST CALL"" buy this book, drink it in, find your way home! -Tom Averill, Writer-in-residence/Professor of English Emeritus at Washburn University of Topeka, and author of ""What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth Century Writers on the Sunflower State""

Author Information

WILL AVERILL is a writer, actor, puppeteer, expat, and townie. Born at LMH in 1974, Averill grew up on the mean streets of North Lawrence, attending Woodlawn, Broken Arrow, Central, Lawrence High School, and KU (twice). In 1997 Will and co-Artistic Director Jeremy Auman started Card Table Theatre, focusing on new works by Midwest authors, the Victor Continental Comedy Show, and Sh*tty Deal Puppet Theatre Company. In 2003, Averill moved to Norwich, England for eight years, co-founding the theatre company Axis of Evil, performing comedy and puppet shows across the U.K. and Europe, and participating in the Edinburgh Fringe from 2007-2010.Will's first published work was the short piece ""We Reuse Everything"" in Central Junior High's literary magazine Inkspots, and it's only gone up from there. His writing includes a series of plays for middle-school students published by Playscripts, Inc., the screenplay ""Riding the Pine"" (with Ric Averill), the poem and Facebook page ""F*ck You, I'm from Kansas,"" and most recently ""King Dale: A Trailer Park Tragedy in Iambic Pentameter (Mostly)."" Averill lives in Lawrence with his amazing wife, little old son, and petulant teenage dog, Daisy.Will really wants to win the Macarthur genius grant, so if you know anyone, hit him up. KENT SMITH (SMITTY) is a dimension-jumping illustrator, designer, sculptor, teacher, problem-maker, problem-solver, and magic-man sharing grand visions from afar. His work can be found on Star Wars toys, Free State beer labels, custom masks, huge woodblocks prints, giant festival sculptures and tiny trading cards. Smitty uses his crazy brainpowers and a menagerie of media to solve problems and deliver creative, unexpected, solutions that are rich in play and story. Kent also celebrates teaching in the Design Department at the University of Kansas, as well as working with the Lawrence Arts Center, VanGo, Percolator and other fine organizations. Smitty loves super-heroes, ninjas, monkeys, UFOs, cryptids, robots, ray-guns, and romance. He is always up for creative adventures and hopes you will come visit Smittytown whenever you need a fantastic escape, ridiculous adventure, and fun solutions for your creative needs. You can reach him at: smittytown.com.

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