A Gay Ol' Time—For a quarter century, the New Mexico Gay Men's Chorus has been singing like angels for appreciative audiences in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and beyond. Founded in 1981 as the Brash Ensemble, the group has gone through plenty of changes over the years, but one thing has always remained consistent: the high quality of the music.

Leo Neufeld and Daddy Long Loin make for an unusual duo. Neufeld is perhaps Albuquerque's best-known portrait painter, a soft-spoken neo-realist with an enviable knack for capturing the intellect, personality and emotions of his subjects. As an artist, he strives to do more than merely replicate the outward appearance of the diverse people he paints. You don't look at one of Neufeld's paintings; you look into it.

The quotation-spouting, citation-dependent young narrator of Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, can be forgiven her tendency toward attribution. With a peripatetic, charismatic, cynical and movie-star-handsome professor father who is given to haughty pronouncements (“It might remind us that no matter the tragedy there’s always the world beyond it. ‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’”) and a beautiful mother who died far young, Blue van Meer is a teen who not only has learned her lessons too well but has taken them to telltale (Poe, E. A.) heart.