The Talk of the Town Slave Quilts by Alison Kilgour. Talk story about Museum of American Folk Art exhibition, "Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South." Author is reminded of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who later became an avid abolitionist. His account of plantation life vividly suggests a life sentence in an uncommonly cruel prison...

Fiction Wher We All Should Have Been by Janet Desaulniers. From Kansas City, a mother calls her daughter in desperate worry about her other daughter (aged 16), who comes home drunk and late every night. The older daughter Ellen, is a juvenile social worker, recently divorced, and still grieving over the death of the father. She goes to her mother...

Books by Helen Vendler.

Comment Comment, Pt. II by Garrison Keillor. A talk story about a homeless man writer met. Tells how the homeless man tried to sell writer a book that the writer had written, until the writer told him who he was. Then he asked him to autograph it. Writer signed the book "With every good wish for a...

Comment Comment, Pt. I by David Talbot. Comment about the resignation of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop... Dr. Koop's exit from government service was a remarkably quiet one, considering all the hullabaloo that surrounded his tenure. There have been few media wrapups & retrospectives, despite the fact that Koop is likely to go down in history as...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

The World of Business BILLION-DOLLAR MIND by Connie Bruck. THE WORLD OF BUSINESS about William farley, 46, one of the leading practitioners of leveraged buyouts (LBOs), the dominant financial phenomenon of the eighties in which debt is substituted for equity on corporations' balance sheets. It has been facilitated by a vastly expanded junk-bond market. While Parley does preside...

A Reporter at Large SEMPER PARATUS by Tony Gibbs. REPORTER AT LARGE about the U.S. Coast Guard & the changes caused by the service's chronic underfunding. Writes about the identity crisis within the organization between the new & old visions of the Coast Guard. Safety at sea, which had been the Coast Guard's principal concern since the end of...

The Talk of the Town Autograph by Garrison Keillor. Writer tells about a custom in his family in which whoever has a birthday is given a candlelit breakfast next to a stack of gifts. While he was out getting lox & bagels for the birthday breakfast, he met a young black man named Kevin who told him this was...

Comment Comment, Pt. II by John Updike. A comment about Czechoslovakia. Tells about the trial of Frantisek Starek, the editor of an underground magazine called Vokno(The Window), who was sentenced a few weeks ago to 2 1/2 years in prison for, along with the usual vague offense of "incitement against the state", the crime of publishing...

The Current Cinema LIES, LIES AND MORE LIES by Terrence Rafferty.

Poetry Spinoza by Stephen Mitchell. For the small boy lying in bed...

Poetry Emergency Ward, St. Vincent's by Constance Urdang. I think they have brought me by mistake...

Poetry Party Per Pale by Susan Prospere. Skinny-dipping in the kidney-shaped pool...