As Maxine has written, “in part a mystery, in part an account of a search in the past and present for an answer, it has to do with the relation between a novelist's art and 'reality', with the ambiguities and the dark spaces in history. Elaine Blair, writing in the New York Review of Books, tells of the journey of Brik through Eastern Europe to capture the sufferings and horrors marking so much of its history. ‘But something else is articulated here besides Brik's pain and rage: a skepticism that has been building throughout his Eastern travels about the extent to which any of us can feel genuine sorrow over historical catastrophes that are well known to us but remote from our own lives.’ What, finally, can fiction, can art in general do to overcome our numb sense of detachment from Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, not to mention the Holocaust? Questions like these are aroused by this book, questions that still need attention.”

Participants for this salon included
Kara Brown, Kellah Edens, Tim Gerber, Karen Heid, Richard Hult, Amy Johnson, Craig Kridel, Anastasiya Schetynska,
Sandra Schmidt, Michael Thigpen,
and Zach Kelehear