The Talk of the Town WHEAT COUNTRY by Berton Roueche. PROFILE of Pratt, Kansas, pop. 6,885. Tells about a talk with Paul Epp, the proprietor of Epp Coins and Supply at 112 South Main Street...

Fiction Record Roundup (Illus.) by Veronica Geng. Parody about some 6,000 hours of White House tape recordings made during the Nixon years, which are soon to be released to the public. Writer reviews the different tapes which are described as if they were popular record albums. A tape called "Wild Scenario" featuring Nixon, Haldeman, Dean and Ehrlichman...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) Void by Harold Rosenberg.

The Talk of the Town Closing Time by Alastair Reid. Talk story about the Teheran, a Persian-Italian-American restaurant that is closing after some 30 years in operation at 45 West Forty-fourth Street. It was an easy amble from the New Yorker offices and that amble has become something of a habit and a ritual for many New...

The Talk of the Town Hoover by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about an 11-year-old harbor seal at the New England Aquarium in Boston who can say his nameNHooverNand a number of other words. He's the only talking seal in the world and the first non-human mammal ever to have produced these sounds. Tells about mimetic actions...

Obituary by Ved Mehta. Obituary of Dwight Macdonald, who died Sunday, Dec. 19, 1982, at age 76. For twenty years or so he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He wrote for a number of other publications, including his own journal of opinion, Politics...

Comment by Jamaica Kincaid. A young woman recalls her childhood and particularly her father, who was a carpenter and a cabinetmaker on a small island not mentioned but thought to be in the West Indies. In the small world she describes (108 sq. miles) her father was the second-best carpenter. The best was...

The Theatre A Carol to Carroll by Edith Oliver.

Fiction The Evolution of Birds of Paradise by Elizabeth Tallent. Simon, an 82-year-old retired professor and famous ornithologist, lives in an old Victorian house in Colorado. His wife, Anna, left him 34 years ago and he still feels that he failed her in some way. His daughter-in-law Ashley, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado...

Reflections THE WAITING NATIONS by William Pfaff. Expressed in what we call the new European pacifism we are at present armed like madmen, with weapons grossly disproportionate to rational military ends, standing in permanent confrontation with Russia. There is no longer agreement among Western governments about what the Soviet danger is. To some in the Reagan Adm...

Poetry The View by Philip Schultz. Remember how the door in our first apartment always stuck...

Poetry Crossing The Stars On New Year's Eve by Dick Allen. Another year. As if exercising its right to be a symbol...