Fiction By the Bedside by Arturo Vivante. Bruno is caring for his mother as she dies slowly of cancer. He had been trained as a doctor but, four years earlier, had given up medicine to devote himself to painting. At his mother's bedside relatives and friends gather, hoping to cheer her up, but actually upsetting her, as...

Musical Events Fantasies in Bath by Nicholas Kenyon.

A Reporter at Large ELEVENTH HOUR by Emily Hahn. REPORTER AT LARGE about a 4-day meeting in San Diego known as World Conference III on Breeding Endangered Species in Captivity. The conference was sponsored by the Zoological Society of San Diego & the Fauna Preservation Society. It was a notably international gathering, of 325 members. Today rare...

The Current Cinema WHO AND WHO by Pauline Kael.

Reflections FINLANDIZATION by William Pfaff. REFLECTIONS on Western Europe's attitude toward the United States and its Finlandization, or policy of accommodating rather than confronting the Soviet Union, as Finland has done. Soviet acts that the U.S. sees as agressive, West Europeans prefer to see as conservative and defensive. They are eager to stay out of...

The Talk of the Town See in New Ways by Ian Frazier. Talk story in which a friend tells of taking Tom, a blocked novelist he knows, to an exhibit in the Union Carbide Building called "Creativity: The Human Resource." Tom is not interested in the exhibit; he complains that he wants a 26-ounce can of Australian Foster's Lager. His friend...

The Talk of the Town Coordinated by Mark Singer. Talk story about Gail Richards, from Beverly Hills, Calif., who arranges, or as she says, coordinates parties. She is 35, and will handle as many or as few of a party's details as her clients wish. If she is asked to totally coordinate a wedding, for example, she will do...

The Talk of the Town Hot Colors by Bobbie Ann Mason. Talk story about a visit to the Picasso retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in order to look at the colors of the visitors' clothes. The afternoon was hot and the crowd resembled a tropical garden of extravagant blooms and gay colors. Pink was a particularly sported color, as...

On and Off the Avenue Feminine Fashions by Kennedy Fraser.

The Talk of the Town Proclaimed by Mark Singer. Talk story about the proclamation of Women's Equality Week, Aug. 20-26. Writer took a cab to City Hall where Mayor Ed Koch made the proclamation and presented the official copy of it to Bella Abzug. On the way down, the cab driver, Ernest Allen, delivers a monologue on things he...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. For some time now, politicians who favor a more aggressive American military policy have been saying that the U.S. has been suffering from a "Vietnam syndrome", whose main symptom is an irrational reluctance to employ force in international affairs; but few have gone so far as to defend the wisdom...

Books Will and Allison by Whitney Balliett.

Fiction Realcamp by John Rolfe Gardiner. The narrator and his wife, Carole, are driving home from a movie when she suggests that the two spend their summer vacation canoeing in New England. This leads them into a dicussion of earlier summers at overnight camps, and the two try to arouse one another's jealosy with talk of...

Poetry Mentioning These Things by Howard Moss. Mentioning these things: a clavichord cover...