The Talk of the Town Recapitoids by James Stevenson. Illustrated talk story about strips and chunks of tire that lie scattered along the shoulders of all highways, by a writer who gets bored while driving and notices them. He watches out for the odd black strips and chunks of rubber-tire treads and tells of the different twisted shapes...

Our Footloose Correspondents Weeset Journal by Whitney Balliett. OUR FOOTLOOSE CORRESPONDENTS about Cape Cod. For 5 summers, the writer has rented a small, one-story shingled house in Weeset Point, a triangular piece of land that juts about 1000 feet into the great Nauset Marsh, lying half way up the east coast of Cape Cod, between Orleans and...

Centennial by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about the Metropolitan Opera, which opened its centennial season on Monday night with an unprecedented amount of money in the bank ($23 million) and a 5-hour production of Hector Berlioz's "Les Troyens." It is based on work by Virgil and a shorter version of the opera put...

Fiction Sakrete by Donald Barthelme. On our street, fourteen garbage cans are now missing. If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans I could not. I very much doubt that my wife is doing it. If my wife is stealing the garbage cans, in the night, while I am drunk and...

Books The New France by V. S. Pritchett.

The Current Cinema ON GOLDEN SWAMP by Pauline Kael.

Letter from the Space Center by Henry S. F. Cooper. Space Shuttle missions five through eight discussed. Now that the Space Shuttle has become operational, its missions, taken one by one, seem random, but writer discovered since spending time at the Johnson Space Center, outside Houston, that there is a definite order and progression to the first dozen or so...

The Talk of the Town Suspense by William McKibben. Talk story about a speech given by Bernhardt J. Hurwood at the Mercantile Library on how to devise plots for detective stories. Mr. Hurwood, a former merchant seaman, film editor, television writer, and public-relations man, has been a writer of mystery since 1966. Mr. Hurwood introduced several mystery writers...

Comment by Garrison Keillor. Twenty years ago, writer quit college and got a job on a daily paper, where he was put in charge of writing obituaries. The obits followed a standard formula, but writer often tried to put in personal touches, such as about the deceased's zinnia beds or rhubarb cake. He did...

Reflections BREAKING THE SPELL by George F. Kennan. REFLECTIONS on Soviet-American relations. While American sympathies naturally lie with people who fall afoul of a police state, democracy is not something that can be imposed from without. World peace is of much greater value than the democratization of Russia, if such a choice must be made. Democracy can...

Fiction Lovers by Marian Thurm. Several love stories. Valerie and her mother, Marilyn, are having lunch at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida. Valerie's father died last year, and recently Marilyn has been seeing a man named Joseph, who she met at a Carnegie Hall concert. For 5 months Marilyn has been acting like a schoolgirl...

Poetry After Labor Day by Sydney Lea. Your son is ten years dead...

Poetry New Hampshire by Howard Moss. When the loons cry...