The Talk of the Town W. A. by Lillian Ross. Talk story, in three parts, about spending an afternoon with William Alfred, the playwright and Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He is in town preparing for the opening of his new play, "The Curse of an Aching Heart," starring Faye Dunaway, who appeared in his first...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) Artists' Books, Art Books, and Books on Art by Calvin Tomkins.

Night Walk to a Country Theatre by Andrew Glaze. Drop from the train's bottom step onto the grit...

Jazz LIGHT EVERYWHERE by Whitney Balliett. PROFILE of Adolphus (Doc) Cheatham, the seventy-six-year-old jazz trumpeter. Cheatham belongs with the lyrical trumpeters who first came forward in the thirties and forties. Their idols were Louis Armstrong, Joe Smith, and Roy Eldridge, and their ranks have thinned. Only Harry Edison and Cheatham keep the lamp...

U. S. Journal LET ME FIND A PLACE by Calvin Trillin. Elsewhere in the country. The Methodist Church does not have a clear-cut position on homosexuals. In the Council of Bishops and in the General Conference of the church, Bishop Melvin E. Wheatley has often stood alone in insisting that homosexuals are Christians without qualification. Wheatley happens to be bishop...

Musical Events Responses by Nicholas Kenyon.

Fiction Straight Ahead by Sergei Dovlatov. Narrator is a soldier in a Russian military camp, which is adjacent to a compound for political prisoners and a labor settlement. He is recovering from a drunken debauch which ended with his being bound up in telephone wire. Becoming sober, he tries to recall what had happened. Bob, the...

Annals of Medicine THE PROGNOSIS FOR THIS PATIENT IS HORRIBLE by Berton Roueche. ANNALS OF MEDICINE about two puzzling deaths in 1978, in Omaha, Nebraska. The victims were an 11-month old boy, Chad Shelton, and his uncle Duane N. Johnson, aged 24. It was ultimately determined that their deaths were due to drinking lemonade poisoned with dimethylnitrosamine. It was deliberately put into...

Comment by John Brooks. The conclusion, within a matter of hours, of the two largest antitrust suits ever brought by the Department of JusticeNthose against A.T. & T. & I.B.M.Nsurely makes Friday, January 8th, one of the landmark days in American business history. The withdrawal of the case against I.B.M was straightforward. The...

Fiction The Windows of the Mint by James McConkey. Writer tells of sifting through the things in his desk drawer and finding an old postcard he loved as a child. The card is a city scene and is fashioned so the time of day in the picture is changeable. It once had lettering on it that said, "U.S. MINT...

Books Strange Interlude by George Steiner.

Poetry Calling Home by Dan Masterson. He dials his dead father's house...

Poetry The Porpoise by Greg Pape. Today in the middle of Missouri...

Poetry Rules of Sleep by Howard Moss. In the sludge drawer of animals in arms...