Toby Henry Review date: 11/21/2008

One of the most startling readings of the night came from former Boston-area performance artist Cathy Vincevic who read a portion of her book "The Tiki Room," a novel that she described as a look into the circumstances under which dictators perpetrate genocide.

Like many other readers that night, Vincevic's story started out with an autobiographical tone, and she described a scene apparently set in her childhood some three decades earlier as she lost a coin on her way to a country store in Candia.

But this bucolic vignette vanishes like smoke as Vincevic segues the story sharply into her first trip to Bosnia where she is confronted by "bullet, bullet, bullet everywhere" and witnesses scenes of Holocaust-type intensity. Vincevic read ...the chapter as an example of her novel, in which she said similar pastoral vignettes are intertwined among heavier observations of inhumanity.