Diego Rivera was the star of the highly political Mexican art that emerged during the 1920 and ’30s, but the visual movements that arose in the country at the time produced other talents. Deborah Caplow chronicles the career of one such artist, Leopoldo Mendez (1902-1969), and shows many examples of his work. Mendez

In a market saturated with vampire stories, it’s refreshing to hear a new and unique voice in the genre. John Marks, whose prior novels have garnered critical acclaim, has crafted a clever adaptation of Bram Stoker’s immortal Dracula with his latest book, Fangland (Penguin). The story takes place partly in post-9/11 New York City, where we meet the eclectic crew of “The Hour,” a weekly news broadcast modeled after “60 Minutes.” Here we are introduced to the heroine, Evangeline Harker, an up-and-coming associate producer from Texas who worked her way up the ladder by using her allure and practical nature. Harker is offered an opportunity to travel to Romania to meet an Eastern European crime lord named Ion Torgu. Despite resistance from her new fianc, Robert, and several co-workers, as well as her own fears, Harker sees this as a career-enhancing assignment that she must take.

This week, mystery lingers in the air like the teasing portents of spring. A host of wellestablished writers stop at Mystery One Bookstore to sign and read excerpts from their newest works. Chicago writer Steven Sidor has authored a new thriller, titled The Mirror’s Edge, that follows a journalist’s obsessive course to track the abductor of a pair of toddler twins. The investigation leads to the world of the supernatural and occult, taking sharp and grisly turns and . . .

As a late boomer, I strained to read the tiny type of the 1,000 album reviews crammed into the Classic Rock guide. An early boomer might go blind. But with magnifying glass in hand, the effort of reading this handbook on the recent past is worthwhile.

Zachary Lazar’s Sway: A Novel (Little, Brown) is a guide to self-involved characters slopping around in the sexual mud and quicksand of the ’60s. All of the characters are members of The Rolling Stones or were associated with them as the 1960s counterculture went the wrong way. Many had to scream “Gimme shelter!” for real. To reference another Stones song, there had been too much sympathy for the devil. The ’60s ran out of brilliant ideas midway through, and the end of it all is what this novel is about, with the Stones as cultural vortex.

Whether exploring the constructs of an overwrought imagination or the disorienting results of an alien visitation, the fantastical collides with the mundane in the works of two young writers coming to Milwaukee this week. View From the Seventh Layer is a new collection of solemn and often beautiful short stories by award-winning writer Kevin Brockmeier. Like much of his work, it straddles the boundary between fantasy and literary fiction . . .

During the Middle Ages, Western Europe was a backwater. In When Asia Was the World, University of Michigan scholar Stewart Gordon explores the fertile cultural interchange that crisscrossed the vast continent along a network of seaports and caravansaries, Buddhist monasteries and Islamic garrisons, through the accounts of a slender handful of Chinese, Arab and Jewish travelers. Stewart is a compelling writer, yet the book is too short to do his topic justice.

New Orleans has been in the news often in the past three years, and most of the headlines have not been good. Despite gradual reconstruction, much of it undertaken by private groups in the face of governments stymied on all levels, portions of the city remain in ruins and its population scattered. New Orleans has become a symbol of relentless nature overwhelming under-funded public programs, a catastrophe of poor planning, a failure of the national imagination. As Ned Sublette implies in his latest book, New Orleans could never have been conceived by the American imagination in the first place. The Crescent City was a Caribbean port swallowed whole and only gradually digested by Manifest Destiny.

The next time you wish you lived anywhere but here, pick up Renewing the Countryside-Wisconsin, read a few pages and change your mind in a hurry. These 39 short pieces, written by several different authors and complemented by stunning fullcolor photography, profile hardworking individuals, organizations and businesses in the state that are blazing trails in sustainable and organic agriculture, environmentally responsible business practices and homegrown . . .

When Marie Antoinette was reputed (however erroneously) to have waived off the plight of France’s starving masses with the words “Let them eat cake” she was clearly unaware of the dire repercussions. The same might be said of the characters in Joanne Fluke’s best-selling Hannah Swensen mysteries. Dead bodies keep turning up in a small Minnesotan town, bearing evidence of having indulged in Swensen’s sweet delights prior to their demise.