Letter from Guyana by Jane Kramer. There are 3/4 of a million people in Guyana, a small country on the Caribbean coast of South America. About a third of them are black, the descendants of slaves who once worked the colony's plantation; over half of them are descendants of indentured peasants from India who took over...

Comment by Richard Harris. Now that Nixon's most powerful contemporary, Pres. Ford, has exonerated him, & concealed the facts, history may indeed deal kindly with the fallen President. But if history has any regard for truth, it will base its final appraisal of Nixon on all the "little" things that typified his career. One...

The Talk of the Town Preservation by Anthony Hiss. Talk Story about Prof. James Marston Fitch, of Columbia University, who is a preservator for Central Park, under the Beame administration. The entire Park is an artifact. Frederick Law Olmsted preserved all the natural features of the site that he liked, but only after he had removed them to install...

Fiction The Kentish Sleep Journal by Marshall Brickman. Humorous piece about Dr. Mordecai Kentish, a Clinical Psychologist, who was involved in the sleep research field. Dr. Kentish was his own subject for a classic experiment in which he stayed awake for more than 300 hrs. in order to study the effects of extensive sleep deprivation. Gives selected portions...

The Talk of the Town Highway by Mark Singer. Talk Story about the dilapidated West Side Highway & the various proposals concerned with its improvement. A group of people calling themselves Action for Rational Transit (ART) held a demonstration outside the Manhattan Center, last Thurs. to try to reduce the vehicle miles travelled in the central business district. Inside...

The Race Track by G. F. T. Ryall. MacKenzie Miller, who trains for the Cragwood Stable brought off a dandy double in the past fortnight, with E.P. Taylor's Hale in the United Nations Handicap at Atlantic City and the Cragwood Stables's Prod. in the Lawrence Realization Stakes at Belmont Park next day...

Books by John Updike.

The Talk of the Town With Sebou by George W. S. Trow. Talk story about the fashionable Persian barber Sebou, who cuts men & women's hair in his headquarters on the 5th floor of 33 E. 68th St. Writer accompanied Stanley Mieses, discotheque editor of the "National Star" to Sebou's for a haircut. Sebou is the first barber Mr. Mieses has seen...

Fiction Last Days by Arturo Vivante. Giacomo, an Italian artist, was spending time with his wife & children in his family's country house in Tuscany, Italy. There he met Leonora (his siter Clara's friend) who, like himself, was also about 40 & married Leonora openly made sexual advances to Giacomo & pronounced her great love. One...

Letter from Washington by Richard H. Rovere. On Sun., Sept. 8 Pres. Ford announced he was granting Richard Nixon a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for any & all crimes he may have committed during his 5 1/2 years as Pres. It was an astonishing-and to many appalling-move, and it almost certainly will put an...

The Current Cinema by Penelope Gilliatt. Review of "Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman", directed by Judy Collins and Jill Godmilow, showing at the Whitney Museum. It is about Dr. Antonia Brico's struggle to work as an orchestra conductor...

Profiles LOOK TO THE THINGS AROUND YOU by Calvin Tomkins. PROFILE of American photographer Paul Strand. Strand, now well into his eighties lives with his third wife, the former Hazel Kingsbury, in Orgeval, France, in a country cottage near Paris. Strand has been living in France since 1950. His work dates back to 1915. Writer traces Strand's career from his...

Poetry Having Children by Douglas Morea. Sky descends; noon of brazen summer...

Poetry No News At All by Jack Butler. The weather isn't news unless extreme...