Visual arts/museums

Peter Mendelsund has designed hundreds of book covers, including two new ones of his own: Cover and What We See When We Read. He talks about his process and why "dead authors get the best" covers.

Jon Sarkin was working as a chiropractor when he suffered a massive stroke. Afterwards, he became an obsessive visual artist whose work was as fragmented and cluttered as his mind had become. Sarkin is the subject of a new book, Shadows Bright as Glass, by science writer Amy Nutt.

Whitman founded the FBI's Art Crime Team and has tracked down more than $225 million worth of stolen art and cultural property -- including a $36 million self-portrait by Rembrandt. Whitman describes the heists in his new memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures.

Judith Fox's new book of photographs is an intimate portrait of a loved one's submergence into Alzheimer's. I Still Do is a chronicle of her husband's journey with the disease.

Street artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic red, white and blue Obama illustration that became the unofficial poster of the campaign. Although his campaign poster never became official, Fairey has been commissioned to design the official poster for the inauguration.

Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met the Beatles in 1960, before they were famous. She took some of the earliest photographs of the group and was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

Over the course of eight years, Matthew Diffee has had more than 100 of his illustrations published in the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker.

But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and for each issue, the editors select only 20 cartoons, in a process that Diffee says may or may not involve the use of darts.

So even Diffee has had to deal with rejection. Happily, he's found a channel: His new book, featuring his own work and that of 37 other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

Award-winning photographer Ashley Gilbertson has spent much of the past five years in Iraq, taking incredible photographs for The New York Times and other publications. Born in 1978, Gilbertson has captured some of the world's most dangerous places on camera. A book of his work, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, will be published this fall.

John Ridley's comic-book series The American Way has just been collected into a graphic novel. The series takes place in 1961, when the government has created a team of super-heroes to battle foreign super-villains. But it's all just a sham — a diversion created to pacify the public.

Ridley, who co-created The American Way with Georges Jeanty and Karl Story, previously wrote the screenplay for Three Kings and the novel A Conversation with the Mann.

Underground comic book artist Robert Crumb created ZAP COMIX and is the artist behind such 1960s and 1970s icons as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep-on-Truckin. His wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb, was one of the earliest underground female cartoonists. Her new book, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, chronicles her life and career. Robert's new book is The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb.