Left Bank Books is celebrating its 45th birthday!  Starting this week, Left Bank Books is asking for one-sentence story prompts from our customers, Facebook & Twitter followers.  These prompts will be collected and on July 11th they will be selected from a hat and provided to an esteemed panel of writers who will use the prompts to write right before your eyes – under glass at Left Bank Books.

The panelists are Mark Tiedemann (whom you know well), Ann Leckie (recent Nebula Award winning author of Ancillary Justice) and Kevin Killeen (local favorite author of Never Hug a Nun) (additional author attendance TBD). These authors, after they receive their prompt, will take turns writing an exclusive short story live in our store window in a Round Robin style-collaboration. While one authors is writing, the others will be on hand to sign books and chat with the public. We will have a projection screen set up so people in the store can watch the story being written in real time!

Throughout the event, audience members can submit “curveballs” to the writers: any suggestions they’d like to give to change the trajectory of the story. Curveballs can be anything from “Use the word lugubrious!” to “Spike has to be in the next scene!” to “Someone in the story has to eat a banana!”

There will also be two raffles that evening. One raffle will be free, and can be entered by submitting a curveball to our authors (prizes TBD). The other raffle can be entered by making a $10 or greater donation to our River City Readers fundraiser, a program that gets books into the hands of public school children for their personal libraries, sponsored by our non-profit, the Left Bank Books Foundation (prizes also TBD).

There will also be cake and beverages available, as this is also a party for Left Bank’s 45th birthday celebration!