MacArthur Grant-recipient Aleksander Hemon is a startlingly bright writer, and in The Lazarus Project, he's positively blinding. On March 2, 1908, a pogrom-surviving, 19-year-old Eastern European Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch knocks on the door of Chicago Police Chief George Shippy. In Averbuch's hand is a letter; in Shippy's, a gun. One hundred years later, a man named Brik decides to resurrect the accused anarchist, and he enlists his pal Rora to document the proceedings. Together, the team takes to the highways and byways of the long-dead Averbuch's homeland, sidestepping gangsters and listening for the whisper of history — until eventually, their quest consumes them.