I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens—as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item.

Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.

• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
• Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
• Notes from a Small Island
• The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
• The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way
• In a Sunburned Country
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life
• One Summer: America, 1927