The Talk of the Town First Garden by James Stevenson. Illustrated Talk story about the first garden of a friend who has rented a house in the country. He writes that after weather prevented him from planting he visited a nursery on a beautiful day. He went to the vegetable-and-herb department where there were hundreds of plants in...

The Talk of the Town Award by Alec Wilkinson. Talk story about a dinner at which the Cop of the Year from the Fifth Precinct was announced. The Fifth Precinct includes the Bowery, parts of SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy. The dinner and ceremony were held in a room in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Building at 62 Mott...

The Talk of the Town Pros and Cons by Lillian Ross. Talk story about a conference, held at the New York Hilton, called Micrographics and the Videodisc. The conference, which was concerned with the various technologies that store and do other things with our words, attracted visitors from such companies as Bell Laboratories, General Dynamics, Eastman Kodak, I.B.M., the Micrographic Products...

A Reporter at Large HOMECOMING II-A POSTING TO TIENTSIN by John Hersey. REPORTER AT LARGE about writer's recent visit to Tientsin, China, where he spent the first eleven years of his life. His father was a missionary who had been recruited by the International Committee of the YMCA, and came to Tientsin in 1905. Writer's Chinese friend Ye Dezhuang got permission from...

Comment by Howard Moss. A story is making the rounds in Florida. In an oceanfront town somewhere between Daytona Beach and Key West, a builder was selling apartments from plans. When the structure rose and the lucky beachcombers moved into their carpeted chambers, they discovered that the beach they had paid good money to...

The Sporting Scene AN OLD MASTER AND SOME LATECOMERS by Herbert Warren Wind. THE SPORTING SCENE, about the 1982 Masters Tournament, won by Craig Stadler on the first hole of a playoff with Dan Pohl, and about Gene Sarazen, the 80-year-old former golf great. Writer, in discussing the greatest players of all time, notes that this year also marks the 70th...

The Current Cinema A DEVIL WITHOUT FIRE by Pauline Kael.

The Theatre B.C. to A.D. by Brendan Gill.

Fiction Nothing Like It by Laura Furman. DickensO "Little Dorrit" mentioned in a story about a young woman named Alice Barnstone, who went to London a few months after she'd graduated from college. She'd saved enough money from a dull job in the circulation department of a magazine to buy a cheap ticket which required her to...

Musical Events Monument by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Sculpture by James Stevenson. Talk story about the remains of a Hudson River pier, at the edge of the Conrail yards, in the Sixties. From West End Avenue it looks like a zeppelin that has crashed or a collapsed roller coaster. It is actually the steel-beam and corrugated-iron remnants of a 150...

Fiction Timetable by James Munves. Parody of the condition of the IRT subway line in the form of a timetable. The timetable shows all the stops on the 7th Ave. IRT Local and the times that the train stops at each stop, from the 6:14 train (ar. South Ferry at 9:01) to the 7:40 train...

Poetry Coming Back in the Spring by W. S. Merwin. When I turn my head in the afternoon...