Comment Comment, Pt. I by Lawrence Weschler. Comment about the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and the situation there in general. In recent days, the murder of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador last November had assumed a kind of diversionary role in the debate about continued US funding of the Salvadoran military. There...

The Talk of the Town Stone Carver by Brendan Gill. Talk story about Simon Verity, the 44 year old English sculptor now employed by the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, who fills the Cathedral niches with his statues Verity comes from a line of architects. His great-grand-father designed the Criterion Theatre in London. Verity chose not...

The Talk of the Town Marathon by Hilton Als. Talk story about a reading of Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans" at Paula Cooper, Inc., in SoHo. The story is written in the style of Stein. The reading of "The Making of Americans" which began at noon on the Saturday preceding the New Year and ended some 50 hours...

Fiction Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro. The narrator dreams of her mother who has died and tells the story of Flora, an adherent of a strict Presbyterian sect (no dancing, etc.) whom her mother befriended while teaching school in the Ottawa Valley. They lived in a partition off of a primitive farmhouse occupied by Flora's sister...

Annals of Politics THE JOHNSON YEARS: THE OLD AND THE NEW II-WHIRLWIND by Robert A. Caro. ANNALS OF POLITICS about Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate race. What he most wanted was political power, but he was stuck in the House of Representatives where he was only an insignificant member. He had been there 10 years in 1947. There was a Senate race in Texas in 1948 &...

A Reporter at Large PRAGUE AUTUMN by Amos Elon. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the peaceful anti-Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia, which began Nov. 17, 1989. Tells how students were attacked by police as they waved national flags and called for the release of political prisoners & for the right of free speech and assembly. Nobody expected the Nov...

Comment Comment, Pt. II by Garrison Keillor. Comment on the writer's weight problem. Everything in the city seems to bring home to him the fact of his weight, or make it worse. He sees it in the subway as it squeezes through its narrow tunnel; he is lured into a Chinese restaurant, and even opera singers at...

The Current Cinema by Pauline Kael.

Books by George Steiner.

Poetry A Foghorn by Brenda Hillman. put their iridescent blades through the grasses and yellow lupine wait to...

Poetry Our Heaven's Words by Fanny Howe. Our heaven's words are wind, farther...

Poetry Reykjavik Winter Couplets by Brad Leithauser. One senses...