Stick a Cork in It—South Valley artist and humanitarian Corky Frausto opens up his spacious hacienda this weekend for the second annual CorkFest, a full day of art, music and assorted entertainment. It's a DIY backyard art festival designed to shine a spotlight on some of the best local artistry currently being concocted in our city.

The Maids at SolArts

It's so difficult to find adequate help these days, don't you find? Servants simply don't have the same respect for their employers that they had in previous generations. If the butler isn't raiding the liquor cabinet, the valet is taking the Rolls for joyrides, the nanny is mistreating the children, or the maids are trying to kill you.

This year has already seen a pestilence of floods, fires, bombings, plane crashes, a tsunami that killed almost a quarter million people, and this nation's worst natural disaster. It would seem that Mother Nature and our own bad selves have trumped the ability to imagine anything bigger or worse. Fittingly, the fall and winter of this publishing season are notably thin on fiction, but large on hulking works of nonfiction that might help us catch up with this out-of-control bobsled called planet Earth. Here are a few soon-to-be-released titles that are especially notable.