Our Far-Flung Correspondents CHARLESTON, SUSSEX by Mollie Panter-Downes. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about a visit to the estate called Charleston, where Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister) and her entourage lived. Charleston is a roomy 18th century farmhouse in Sussex, England which they rented from the estate of a local landowner, Viscount Gage, of Firle Place. In the autumn...

Fiction Duty by Vicki Covington. Jack takes his baby daughter to his law office that morning because the baby sitter is sick. He calls his wife Marian, who is a surgeon's assistant, to tell her that Peyton is with him. Marian's partner answers his wife's beeper because Marian is in surgery. Jack remembers when he...

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

Reflections QUESTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE I-HORSES by Vicki Hearne. REFLECTIONS in which writer talks about our relationships with domestic animals, which matters to her as a dog trainer and horse trainer. Her temperament regularly led her away from the kennel and tack room to universities. For some years she inhabited two completely different worlds of discourse, each using a...

The Theatre by Edith Oliver.

Books by John Updike.

Comment by Jonathan Schell. There is something humiliating in the notion of the zeitgeist-that invisible hand which fixes the direction of our thoughts and so produces a "spirit of the age" or a trend or mere fad. In the last 20 years or so, the grounds for worries about the Zeitgeist have been...

The Talk of the Town Sharp by Mark Singer. Talk story about Lenny Binelli who is in his mid-forties, and is a professional knife sharpener. His father, who is no longer alive, sharpened knives, and so did both his grandfathers. His son, Leonard, has recently joined him in the business. Lenny drives a white Chevy van with, on...

Fiction The Letter Scene by Susan Sontag. Writer combines factual and fictional accounts of letter writing in paragraph form. She begins with a writer's thoughts on preparing to write--"the proper implements at hand. Pen, pencil, typewriter, computer"--and then begins a series of paragraphs which depict factual and fictional letter writing scenes. The love story of...

The Talk of the Town Refinements-Pt. II by William McKibben. Part II of a talk story about goods for children. This one is about the updating of children's books by Simon & Schuster. Ronald Buehl, of Simon & Schuster, remarked to the writer that "every fifteen years or so, Nancy Drew is brought up to date." He showed the writer...

Poetry Arabian Night by James Merrill. Features unseen embers and tongs once worried...