Books by John Updike.

The Talk of the Town Winter Pond by Bobbie Ann Mason. Talk story about a weekend spent by a couple that has moved to the country. Saturday the writer and her husband skated on their frozen pond. Sunday, dodging snowflakes, they picked up the Sunday Times and, imitating people in New York, went to a brunch at a friend's house. The...

The Talk of the Town Words by Wallace White. Talk story about visit to the International Word Processing Association Spring Symposium, held last week at the Hilton. Word processing, a field in which jobs hardly existed five years ago, is the big news in office work these days. As one person explained it, word processors are just machines that...

The Theatre MERRY SUBVERSIONS by Brendan Gill.

The Air On the Trail of a "Fine Careless Rapture" by Michael J. Arlen. Column about the battle for reality in film and TV news programs and documentaries. Flaherty was a filmmaker, a realist, who had difficulty finding support for his projects...

The Talk of the Town The Shave by Lillian Ross. Talk story in which the author investigates the almost forgotten institution known as the barbershop shave. Lists sample prices at a number of barber shops. Discusses reasons for the decline in demand. In barbershops where shaves are still available, they are usually done with disposable chromium blades; some barbers still...

Dancing Present at the Creation by Arlene Croce.

The Sporting Scene A THEORETICALLY HAPPY SITUATION by E. J. Kahn. SPORTING SCENE about the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, NY, from Feb. 13-24. 1,470 athletes represented 37 nations. U.S. winners included Eric Heiden of Wisconsin who won 5 gold medals in speed skating, and the U.S. ice-hockey team, coached by Herb Brooks, which beat the Russians in...

Letter from London by Mollie Panter-Downes. The steelworkers' strike is still perching over the doorway of No. 10 like some large black bird that will not go away. Evening after evening, people sat before television glumly watching the lines of policemen as they struggled to hold back the mobs of picketers. In the middle of it...

Fiction Autumn Sunshine by William Trevor. Canon Moran, a Church of Ireland clergyman, lives alone in a rectory in County Wexford. His wife Frances has died but hasn't "yet become a ghost." What he misses most is her practical view of life. Moran is delighted when he hears that his daughter Deirdre is coming for a...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (an act of war, costing thousands of lives and destroying the independence of a nation) and the American gold-medal victory in Olympic hockey, coming shortly after our defeat of the favored Soviet team (a triumph in a sporting match), were events of different orders...

Fiction Browsing by Bruce McCall. A series of 23 unrelated, imaginary photographic captions, meant to appear as if taken from different literary sources. Many of these humorous captions include photographic credits. The photographs described include a scene of a World War I army camp, in which a soldier is seen blowing his nose, a shot...

Musical Events King and Count by Nicholas Kenyon.

Books Journeyers by John Updike.

Around City Hall Counting by Andy Logan. Mayor Koch handed out copies of the city's tentative budget for the 1981 fiscal year, beginning July 1st, on Jan. 16%. The Mayor testified at the end of Jan. before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Comm., which monitors N.Y. fiscal conditions, He assured the committee that his proposed...

Poetry In Another Country by William Pitt Root. Waiting to be served, we look from the veranda...

Poetry Memory by Laura Jensen. The falcon is directed by an arm...

Poetry Upstate by Derek Walcott. A knife blade of cold air keeps prying...