The Talk of the Town Afterlife by Alma Guillermoprieto. Talk story about visiting Moscow's most important cemetery, Novodevichy (which means New Virgin, and also refers to an adjoining convent, built in 1524). On their first visit, the writer and a friend laid flowers on Gogol's tomb. They saw many flamboyant tombstones, including a life-size portrait in stone of...

A Reporter at Large PARROTS by Jane Stern. A REPORTER AT LARGE about parrots. About seventy species of parrots, including some of the most widely known ones, are likely to vanish within the next ten years, and of a world total of 332 species all but three are formally listed in international treaties as threatened or endangered. A...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) by Adam Gopnik.

The Talk of the Town Fever by Susan Orlean. Talk story about shopping at Loehmann's discount clothing stores in New Hyde Park and the Bronx, with Elizabeth Hayt-Atkins, a contemporary-art critic. Thinking the fall collections might already be on the racks, Elizabeth and the writer head for New Hyde Park, L.I., where Loehmann's ships most of its...

The Current Cinema SURVIVOR by Terrence Rafferty.

Comment by Adam Gopnik. Comment about reading a 50-year-old copy of the "Reader's Digest Reader"--a compilation of articles and features selected in 1940, when the "Digest" had been published for 18 years. Tells about future predictions of the "Digest" at that point. Some of the genres you can find in the...

Books by John Updike.

Profiles A PART IN THE PLAY by Cynthia Zarin. PROFILE of actress Linda Hunt, 45, who is 4'9" tall & weighs 80 pounds. When people Hunt has worked with in the theatre or in the movies talk about her, the words that come up most often are "authority" & "intelligence". When she talks about herself she must be...

Fiction Hungry Hungry Hippos by Edward Allen. The narrator reminisces about his first year out of college, in the seventies, when he was unemployed and spent his time watching television. He lived in a cabin, in what had once been a Jewish summer resort. His taste ran to reruns of shows from the fifties and sixties. He...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Fiction Crosswords by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ailie, the narrator, is a waitress at Hiway House of Waffles, near Portland, Oregon. Ailie recounts her life--a series of failed marriages, waitressing jobs, and periods of heavy drinking. Her mother had also been married several times; when Ailie visited her, after not having seen her for seven years...

Poetry The Marriage Sculptor by Mona Van Duyn. As we wandered, bored, in the halls of The Great Museum...

Poetry Country Lunch by Charles Simic. A feast in the time of plague...

Poetry Home by Derek Walcott. House of umbrage, house of fear...