front cover of Cuba, Hot and Cold
Cuba, Hot and Cold
Tom Miller
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Cuba—mysterious, intoxicating, captivating. Whether you’re planning to go or have just returned, Cuba, Hot and Cold is essential for your bookshelf. With a keen eye and dry wit, author Tom Miller takes readers on an intimate journey from Havana to the places you seldom find in guidebooks.

A brilliant raconteur and expert on Cuba, Miller is full of enthralling behind-the-scenes stories. His subjects include one of the world’s most resourceful master instrument makers, the famous photo of Che Guevara, and the explosion of the USS Maine. A veteran of the underground press of the 1960s, Miller describes the day Cuba’s State Security detained him for distributing copies of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration of 1948 and explains how the dollar has become the currency of necessity. His warm reminiscences explain the complexities of life in Cuba.

Since his first visit to the island thirty years ago, Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor. His first book on Cuba, Trading with the Enemy, brought readers into the “Special Period,” Fidel’s name for the country’s period of economic free fall. Cuba, Hot and Cold brings us up to date, providing intimate and authentic glimpses of day-to-day life.

 
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front cover of The Panama Hat Trail
The Panama Hat Trail
Tom Miller
University of Arizona Press, 1986
Critically acclaimed author Tom Miller reveals the making and marketing of one Panama hat, from the straw fields of Ecuador’s coastal lowland to a hat shop in Southern California. Along the way, the hat becomes a literary device allowing Miller to give us his impressions from the tributaries of the Amazon to the mountainsides of the Andes. The Panama Hat Trail is at once a study in global economics and a lively travelogue.
 
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front cover of Writing on the Edge
Writing on the Edge
A Borderlands Reader
Edited by Tom Miller
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Twenty miles wide and two thousand long, the U.S.-Mexico borderland is a country unto itself that has been celebrated in the works of many writers—and not just those who call it home. Here artists as disparate as Carlos Fuentes, Maya Angelou, and Allen Ginsberg have found literary inspiration, presenting the region through varied viewpoints that give border writing its unusual scope and texture.

This wide-ranging anthology—gathering short stories and essays, song lyrics and poems—offers readers a new appreciation of the border and its literature. Residents of the region may be startled to learn how many passers-by have been struck by this unruly slice of North America, while those living in other parts of the country may be surprised to find it more than a dateline for reports of smuggling and illegal immigration.

Collected here are both celebrated and underappreciated gems of American and Mexican literature depicting a region that for some writers represents an exotic land, for others home. Writing on the Edge juxtaposes passages by New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams and native songwriter Flaco Jiménez, British novelist Graham Greene and American poet Demetria Martínez, to show us the border from both sides and from a distance. In all of the selections, La Frontera looms larger than life—an energizing force that frames the lives of the characters living within its boundaries. Included in the book is a literary map of the border highlighting the sites with which each author is identified.

As editor Tom Miller observes, the very notion of literature in a region considered an "irrelevant nuisance" allows for more free-ranging creative output." Writing on the Edge sparkles with such creativity and invites readers to enjoy the best of two worlds—and of the world they share.

Print a literary map of the borderlands here!

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