Know what I do at night while you're asleep? Eat your trash, that's what! With ten wide tires, one really big appetite, and an even bigger smell, this truck's got it all. His job? Eating your garbage and loving every stinky second of it! And you thought nighttime was just for sleeping.

For the first time the complete works of the award-winning author Elizabeth Gilbert are collected together, highlighting her talents as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. In the international best-seller Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert narrates her struggles after a bitter divorce and turbulent love affair, beginning her quest to rediscover how to be happy. In Rome, she indulges herself and gains nearly two stone. In India, she finds enlightenment through scrubbing temple floors. Finally, in Bali a toothless medicine man reveals a new path to peace, leaving her ready to find love again. In Committed, Gilbert is about to wed the man she fell in love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love and with wit and intelligence contemplates marriage, trying with all her might to discover what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. In The Last American Man, Gilbert presents a fascinating, intimate portrait of the American naturalist and brilliant modern hero Eustace Conway, who at the age of seventeen ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape into the wild. Attempting to instil in people a deeper appreciation of nature, Conway stops at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder adventures. In Gilbert's first novel Stern Men, the eighteen-year-old irredeemably unromantic Ruth Thomas returns home from boarding school determined to join the 'stern-men'. Throwing her education overboard, this feisty and unforgettable American heroine helps work the lobster boats and brushes up on her profanity, eventually falling for a handsome young lobsterman. In Pilgrims, Gilbert's sharply drawn and tenderly observed collection of twelve short stories, tough heroes and heroines, hardened by their experiences, struggle for their epiphanies and seek companionship as fiercely as they can.

The coming-of-age of a 24-year-old grocery clerk who has spent his entire life in an Iowa town with a population of 1091.

Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google? is just one of the challenging, controversial and thought-provoking questions Ian Gilbert poses in this urgent and invigorating book. Questioning the unquestionable, this fully updated new edition will make you re-consider everything you thought you knew about teaching and learning, such as: • Are you simply preparing the next generation of unemployed accountants? • What do you do for the ‘sweetcorn kids’ who come out of the education system in pretty much the same state as when they went in? • What’s the real point of school? • Exams – So whose bright idea was that? • Why ‘EQ’ is fast becoming the new ‘IQ’. • What will your school policy be on brain-enhancing technologies? • Which is the odd one out between a hamster and a caravan? With his customary combination of hard-hitting truths, practical classroom ideas and irreverent sense of humour, Ian Gilbert takes the reader on a breathless rollercoaster ride through burning issues of the twenty-first century, considering everything from the threats facing the world and the challenge of the BRIC economies to the link between eugenics and the 11+. As wide-ranging and exhaustively-researched as it is entertaining and accessible, this book is designed to challenge teachers and inform them – as well as encourage them – as they strive to design a twenty-first century learning experience that really does bring the best out of all young people. After all, the future of the world may just depend on it

Over the past hundred years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; ocean-going aliens, not refugees. They are too big for the world they have entered. Their story is our story too. Landfill is the original and compelling story of how in the Anthropocene we have learned about the natural world, named and catalogued it, and then colonized it, planted it, or filled it with our junk. While most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, hiding away from us, some vanishing forever, gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world. For these reasons Landfill is the nature book for our times, groundbreaking and genre-bending. Without nostalgia or eulogy, it kicks beneath the littered surface of the things to discover stranger truths.