Letter from Cairo by John Newhouse. LETTER FROM CAIRO about President Hosni Mubarak. "Sadat was good theatre," says Muhammad Sid Ahmed, an engaging artistocrat and Marxist, who is a prominent columnist for Al Ahali, a left-wing newspaper. "But he did something that had never been done before. He put the leaders of every political tendency...

A Reporter at Large COUNTRY GOLF by Garrison Keillor. REPORTER AT LARGE about writer's visit to Tennessee in May to see his old friend Chet Atkins. Writer and Atkins played golf with a banker from Columbia named Smally, Billy Edd Wheeler, a songwriter, and Archie Campbell, the comedian. Writer recognized him right away from watching the television show "Hee...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents THE WAX WORKS by Timothy Crouse. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about the Wax Works show at the Annisquam Sea Fair in Annisquam, Mass. For the thirty years that the writer has been attending the fair, what made it special was the Punch-and-Judy show and the Wax Works. The Punch-and-Judy show, a wonderfully...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Comment Comment-Part 2 by James Lardner. Comment about a public hearing on the multibillion dollar road, park, and housing venture known as Westway in the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden. This has been a ten-year controversy. The construction unions want the 100,000 man-years of labor Westway promises to provide, and defended the project...

Fiction Addio by Penelope Gilliatt. Madame Johanna Alba was at the London Victorian Wigmore Hall, where she was to conduct a master class. Her famed role for fifty years had been Cherubino in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." At seventy, she had surrendered that sprightly young-boy part and became famous as the same opera's...

Reflections THE DEFICIT by Robert Heilbroner. REFLECTIONS about the federal deficit for 1984, which is estimated to amount to 185 billion dollars. This amount is alarming most Americans (although the per-capita debt is still far below half that of 1946), and a "Bipartisan Budget Appeal" has called on the President and Congress to take major...

Fiction The Long Rain by Jamaica Kincaid. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old girl in Antigua. For over a year, no rain had fallen. Then black clouds gathered. It drizzled for a few days, and then the rain started to come down in a heavy torrent. It went on for over three months. About the same...

Dance Style by William McKibben. Talk story about Ramankutty Nair, a superstar of Kathakali, the highly stylized dance-drama popular in South India. The writer spoke to Mr. Nair at the Asia Society theatre, where he was putting on his makeup for a performance of the Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali troupe. Writer tells about the five...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. Not so long ago, people on the right used to warn us all against "creeping socialism." Writer describes what he observes to be a creeping democracy. He discusses George Konrad's view of democracy. George Konrad is a distinguished Hungarian novelist, and the author of "Antipolitics." Konrad accepts that, given the...

Books by V. S. Pritchett.

Poetry This Sentence by Mary Virginia Micka. The patch on my ceiling waits like an eyelid...

Poetry A Sister On The Tracks by Donald Hall. Between pond and sheep barn, by maples and watery birches/she paces...