Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

Books by George Steiner.

Profiles The Mayor-I by Ken Auletta. PROFILE of Mayor Edward Koch (who became Mayor in Jan. 1978). He was the second of three children, born in the Bronx in 1924. His parents were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland. Koch graduated from NYU School of Law in 1948. He became interested in reform Democratic politics, joining the...

The Talk of the Town Vicariance by Henry S. F. Cooper. Talk story about a biogeography conference held at the American Museum of Natural History to discuss the two opposing theories of the means by which animals and plants became distributed over the earth: the vicariance and dispersalist distribution theories. Tells about the participants in the conference and about the theories...

Fiction My Mother Breathing Light by Stephanie Vaughn. The writer is staying in the Ohio countryside with her mother who has cancer. A year ago she had an operation to remove a tumor from her intestine, now she has cancer in her liver. Her mother refers to cancer only euphemistically, and looks and feels healthy. She does not...

Comment by Julie Hayden. We received a plant as a reward for good behavior. The office gardener identified it as a gloxinia, and gave instructions for its care. A few days later she came in and was astonished to see holes in the plant. A hungry caterpillar was found. We managed to extricate it...

The Talk of the Town Marty! Bring Seltzer! by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about the revival, on a small-scale, of the door-to-door seltzer delivery business in Manhattan. Describes an average work day of Marty the seltzer man, and tells about what his one-truck business involves. Marty, 34, is the oldest of four young New Yorkers who have...

A Reporter at Large WHEN THE SNOW THAWS by David Finkelstein. REPORTER AT LARGE about a journey through China, covering 7,000 miles and passing through areas only recently opened to foreign travelers--from Canton, in the south, to Peking and Tientsin, in the northeast, then southwest through Szechwan to the province of Yunnan, east on the Yangtze River to Shanghai, and...

Fiction Portrait of the Artist As A Young Cat's Paw by S. J. Perelman. Writer reminisces about his youth when he was a cartoonist living in Greenwich Village. His recollections are brought on by a copy of the book, "James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist", by Stan Gebler Davies. In it Davies tells about "Ulysses" being smuggled into the U.S. from Canada. The...

The Current Cinema The Earth as an Overturned Bowl by Donald Barthelme. Review of "Woyzeck", a film directed by the German director Werner Herzog. It's taken from Georg Buchner's 1830s drama, from which the Alban Berg opera was also drawn and first staged, in 1913...

Poetry The Discoverer by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Past the small islands that speckle the Coral Sea...

Poetry Four Poems by Robert Penn Warren. Never--yes, never--before these months just past...