I Am A Stranger Here Myself

Winner of the 2020 WILLA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Women Writing the West Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn in to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family. Arranged in four sections as a series of interlocking explorations and ruminations, Gwartney uses Whitman as a touchstone to spin a tightly woven narrative about identity, the power of womanhood, and coming to peace with one's most cherished place.

When an old friend asked him to write a weekly dispatch from New Hampshire for the Mail on Sunday's Night and Day magazine, Bill Bryson firmly turned him down. So firm was he, in fact, that gathered here are nineteen months' worth of his popular columns about the strangest of phenomena -- the American way of life.Whether discussing the dazzling efficiency of the garbage disposal unit, the mind-boggling plethora of methods by which to shop, the exoticism of having your groceries bagged for you, or the jaw-slackening direness of American TV, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on the world's richest and craziest country.

Jen Larsen always thought that if she could only lose some weight, she would be unstoppable. She was convinced that once she found a way to not be fat any more, she would have the perfect existence she’d always dreamed of. When diet after diet failed, she decided to try bariatric surgery, and it worked better than she ever could have dreamed: she lost 180 pounds. As the weight fell away, though, Larsen realized that getting skinny was not the magical cure she thought it would be—and suddenly, she wasn’t sure who she was anymore. Stranger Here is the brutally honest, surprisingly hilarious story of one woman’s journey from one extreme of the weight spectrum to the other, and of the unexpected emotional chaos it created. Insightful and unsparing in her self-examination, Larsen depicts the exhilarating highs and devastating lows she experienced as a result of her weight loss—the incredible joy of finally beginning to look like the image of herself she’s always carried inside her head, and the crushing pain and confusion of feeling like a stranger in her own body after losing the weight that has always defined her.

From modest beginnings in Fiji, a dot in the Pacific Ocean, to the dining tables of queens and prime ministers, Bhaichand Patel's journey shows him to be the quintessential self-made man. Journalist, author, lawyer, diplomat, film critic, with a gift for mixing a potent cocktail--he has dived into every avocation with aplomb, and emerged with some great insights and plenty of stories. In I Am a Stranger Here Myself, he puts these together in a narrative that takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride all over the world--from Fiji, Bombay, London to New York, Cairo, Manila--coming to rest in the leafy environs of New Delhi's Sujan Singh Park.Traipsing through the book's pages are distinguished lawyers, judges, diplomats, journalists, politicians, authors, actors and directors--some down on their luck, others on the rise.An early practitioner of the work hard, party harder philosophy, Patel shows that life can be as difficult as we want to make it, or as much fun. As Henry Miller put it, 'Do anything, but let it produce joy'.