Fiction A Delayed Meeting by M. F. K. Fisher. Alice Tomlinson visits her daughter Anne and Anne's husband Hubert. Alice is a widow. She feels at dinner that she has been cast in the role of the bird-brained, twittering mother. In her opinion, Hubert, a famous surgeon, is a pompous, conniving stud and Anne is his puppet. Alice...

The Talk of the Town Coming In by Calvin Tomkins. Talk story about rounding up the animals in Wild Asia, a year-old, 38-acre area of the Bronx Zoo in which 180 animals roam free while human spectators ride by in a monorail observation car. James Doherty, the zoo's curator of mammalogy, tells why the animals have to be...

The Race Track by G. F. T. Ryall. The art dealer Daniel Wildenstein's Flying Water, one of the leading runners of her age in France, making a burst of tremendous speed to gain the lead in the New York Handicap at Belmont Park, crashed into the rails at the stretch turn. She injured a shoulder so badly that...

The Current Cinema "LIFE 2" by Penelope Gilliatt.

The Art World (The Art Galleries) by Mollie Panter-Downes.

The Talk of the Town Heyday by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about the inaugural run of a 58-year old locomotive that had been retired in the South for 25 years before New England's Valley Railroad bought it from Aberdeen & Rockfish Railroad Co., of North Carolina. Steam Locomotive No. 40, worth about sixty thousand dollars, left Essex, Conn...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Around City Hall AROUND CITY HALL REPRISE by Andy Logan. A look back at what happened to Matthew Troy, Queens Councilman, who was also the Queens County Democratic chairman - the political boss of that borough. Tells how he made indiscreet smart cracks or told reporters what really happened in some smoke-filled room the night before. He was known as...

Letter from London by Mollie Panter-Downes. The Labor government squeaked through a vote of confidence recently in Parliament but Jim Callaghan will have to face Margaret Thatcher in an election sometime soon. Tells about the issues. Tells about Alec McCowen's current hit at the Comedy Theatre, London, which consists of his solo recitation of the Gospel...

Fiction The Desertion by Berry Morgan. Though Dana Ingles had always assumed his grandmother would stay forever with him and his alcoholic father, he woke one morning at age 14 to see her leaving. She did not say goodbye. She had always said she would leave when Dana and his father could manage alone. Dana tries...

A Reporter at Large THE TOWERS OF LIGHT by Suzannah Lessard. REPORTER AT LARGE about midtown skyscrapers. The glass curtain wall stands at a point in history where the spirit seeking liberation from the past encounters fear of the future. In 1978, the skyscrapers are, for many people, symbols of what is threatening about the time in which we live. The...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents LOW AND SLOW, MEAN AND CLEAN by Calvin Trillin. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about the custom of lowriding among Mexican-Americans in California. Lowriding means cruising very slowly in a car which has had its springs altered so that the body rides very low to the ground. Lowriding began among Chicano street gangs in East L.A. in the forties...

Comment by Mark Singer. A young friend writes that he found a foreign object in his yogurt - a thin, dime-size circular piece of metal. He sent it to the company. Back came a letter of apology a new dollar bill, pamphlets, discount coupons, etc. He was not satisfied. He feels that the letter...

The Talk of the Town Phantom by James Stevenson. Talk story about a ride in a plane from Connecticut to Long Island to search for a Great White Shark rumored to be in the area south of Montauk. Reporter rode in a plane belonging to the Coastal Air Services. The shark was not found...

Poetry Koenig of the River by Derek Walcott. Koenig knew now there was no one on the river...