Books & Books, Miami Book Fair and independent bookstores across the country present…

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything--Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

Books & Books is excited to join forces with our indie bookstore partners Gibson's Bookstore, The King’s English Bookshop, Left Bank Books and University Book Store for this special conversation with Jane McGonigal and Charles Duhigg.

A world-renowned future forecaster and game designer teaches us to envision the future before it arrives--and gives us the tools to help shape the world we want to live in.

The COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most disruptive events in human history, has made it more challenging than ever to feel prepared, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.

In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she's designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:

Build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now

Develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively

Take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire

Access "urgent optimism," an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency

Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine--until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.

Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and designer of reality games created to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (Penguin Press, 2016), and her TED talks on how gaming can improve our lives have more than 15 million views. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California, currently teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University, and is the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future's series on the Coursera platform. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which has spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, and Smarter Faster Better, also a bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker Magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, PBS’s NewsHour and Frontline. He was also, for one terrifying day in 1999, a bike messenger in San Francisco.

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Imaginable: An Evening with Jane McGonigal and Charles Duhigg