Live event with Lillian Moats/If You Exist

This event is sold out!  Sorry for any inconvenience.  While we won't be able to welcome you in person to the event, you can still order a signed copy of the new book here:   https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/book/9781736723203

Join Anderson’s bookshop for an in-person event with local author Lillian Moats to celebrate her newest book, If You Exist: In Search of a Reader Deep in the Future!  

This event will be held in our Downers Grove store, and pre-registration is required as space is limited.

Please read these COVID protection requirements carefully:

Masks are required of all customers, regardless of vaccination status, and must remain properly covering the face for the entirety of the event.

A ticket is required for all attendees, attendance will be capped at 30, and seating may also be restricted in order to allow for social distancing.

Anderson’s Bookshop, the author, and the publisher reserve the right to change the format of this event to a virtual one at any time if it becomes necessary.  A change in format will not entitle ticket holders to any refund.

Failure to follow these guidelines and to treat all participants with courtesy and respect may result in your expulsion from the event.

Please be advised that Anderson’s Bookshop assumes no responsibility or liability for any personal injury or other loss you may incur as a result of your decision to attend an event, including the transmission of Covid-19 or related illnesses.  We expect that for the protection of everyone, all applicable Covid related protocols will be followed.  

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

More about the book:

If You Exist is a personal message written to no one living now, but rather to one of our human progeny who might find it many generations in the future. The aging narrator, like others in her generation, faces her own mortality at the same time she faces the possibility of thousands more species, including her own, becoming extinct. She speaks of Hunters and Gatherers as she has radically redefined these terms, and applies them to her concerns about the future of Homo sapiens and to the survival of life on our planet.

As a private heartfelt message to someone who may never exist, the writer likens her missive to a note in a bottle set to sea in hopes of reaching you, if you exist in the future on some unfathomable shore. The narrator shares her personal take on where humanity is now and where we might be heading depending on what choices we will make. Wishing that her imagined reader could answer questions about whether the writer's anxieties have ever been resolved, she writes about climate change and such topics as human migration, racism, the pandemic, as well as her projected concerns about the possibilities of unbridled technical advancement and human redesign.

After offering her perspective on where hope could lie, the writer ends her note with the stuff of fairy tales, her positive fantasy in the final chapter called, If We Could Meet.

About the author:

Lillian Moats was born in Detroit in 1946. She attended Barnard College and graduated with a B.F.A in art and creative writing from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in education from the University of Wisconsin. She has been an artist throughout her life, expressed in painting, film and illustration. From her mid-twenties through mid-forties, with her creative partner JP Somersaulter, she created over 20 short animated films for children and adults. These original stories and retellings of classic fairy tales have been shown and awarded in festivals around the world and are in the permanent collection of the Chicago Film Archive. Her drive to write rose to the forefront in 1993 and has continued to be her most satisfying creative outlet to the present. She has written a collection of original fairy tales, a fictionalized memoir, a work of creative non-fiction, another of political fiction and now a short philosophical essay with a twist.