In today’s Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirsch explores Writing on the Edge, a new collection of border literature edited by Tom Miller and published by the University of Arizona Press. Kirsch gives a glowing review:

When author and journalist Tom Miller moved to a town on the frontier between the United States and Mexico in the late 1960s, he resolved to master Spanish. “I wandered into a bookstore and asked for something to get me started,” he recalls in the preface to Writing on the Edge, an anthology of what he calls “borderland literature.” “The clerk handed me How to Speak Spanish With Your Servant.”

With each of the 85 selections in Writing on the Edge, Miller allows us to see and feel the deep, sometimes bitter irony of his anecdote. Ranging from song lyrics to selections from novels and memoirs, from poetry to political manifestos — and drawing on the work of writers as diverse in age, gender, style and sensibility as Sandra Cisneros and Joseph Wambaugh, Richard Rodriguez and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Woody Guthrie and Carlos Fuentes — Miller’s anthology is extraordinarily rich, complex and unsettling.

And lower down:

The book includes some intriguing and illuminating items: A map of “The Literary Borderland” confirms the suggestion in some selections that the California towns of Bakersfield and Modesto may be far from the frontier in miles but not so far when measured in memory, and a roster linking the various contributors to towns about which they write reminds us that the border has attracted the attention of some surprising (and diverse) writers, poets and singers, including Stephen Crane, Jack Kerouac, John Reed, Marty Robbins and William Carlos Williams.

Read more in the Sunday Book Review (registration required).

Read the book’s introduction here.