The Talk of the Town Luncheon by Jamaica Kincaid. Talk story about a luncheon for people who have been in a movie. A girl and a man wait for a table in the restaurant, which is crowded with people. She points out Bruce Dern, Robert Mitchum, Martin Sheen, and Paul Sorvino. Her companion notices Stacy Keach. They talk to...

Fiction The Fortune-Teller by Muriel Spark. Lucy accompanies her married friends Sylvia and Raymond to a chateau in France. The marriage is going bad and until she sees the chateau she plans to go on back to London alone. The proprietor, the marquise Mme. Dessain, takes a liking to Lucy and deliberately mistakes her for the...

Fiction Checkout by Thomas Meehan. Reveries of a Walla Walla Houseperson Standing in Line at the Grand Union and Wondering Whether to Fork Out Sixty-Five Cents for the National Enquirer) Parody in which Betty Jo Upchurch and her husband Forrest stand in line at the supermarket and imagine themselves to be the subjects of...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) Museums Without Walls by Calvin Tomkins.

Comment by Jonathan Schell. At present the world faces two issues of overriding concern the peril of nuclear war and the peril of economic collapse including, especially, the peril of a collapse of the international financial system, which is threatened by towering international debts that have accumulated in the last decade or so. The...

Musical Events Gorgeous Tragedy by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town The Typewriter by William McKibben. Talk story about what people write on the sample sheets of paper in department-store typewriter displays. Writer laments the decline of the plain old typewriter, saying that if typing is driving a car, then electronic typing is climbing into the back of a cab. Writer finds that, as in...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents PEEPING IN THE SHELL by Faith McNulty. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about watching a whooping-crane egg hatch. Writer received a call from George Archibald, the crane man. He called from Baraboo, Wisconsin, the HQ of the International Crane Foundation, to tell her that a chick, still inside an egg laid 28 days before by a captive...

Profiles II-A WAY OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN by Helen Drees Ruttencutter. PROFILE of Andre Previn, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, conductor emeritus of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the future (1985) music director of London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He enjoys coming to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Berkshire Music Center. Part of the reason...

Books An Outsider in Washington by Richard J. Barnet.

The Talk of the Town Yearbook Pictures by Stanley Mieses. Talk story about high school yearbook pictures. During a two week period when more than 800 seniors at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, were scheduled to be photographed for their graduation yearbook, writer was on hand for one busy afternoon in a small office that Hillcrest provided for the...

The Theatre Off Broadway by Edith Oliver.

Poetry Freeze by George Amabile. Across the tall sky...

Poetry It Is Not Dead by Robert Penn Warren. It is not dead. It is simply weighty with wisdom...