Fiction Orbits by Frederick Busch. Ginger and Charlie visited her 76-year-old parents and reported on their daughters; one in a dance camp, the other a waitress at a bar near Provincetown. They sat on the porch drinking, and not talking about her parents' health or their growing burden: This large colonial house &...

Comment Comment, Pt. I by Jonathan Schell. Last week, things were getting a little wild in the news. But then things are bound to get wild whenever we permit Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to occupy to center of our attention-when we rivet our gaze on him, pore over his unpredictable and contradictory utterances, and organize our foreign...

The Talk of the Town The Kid by William McKibben. Talk story about Genqui Numata, a perfornance artist from Japan who is known as the Bonsai Kid. Writer mentions that next year marks the hundredth anniversary of the international language Esperanto's first grammar, by Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof. Writer was reminded of this when he went to see Numata, who does...

Books by Jeremy Bernstein.

Fiction Odd Jobs by Peter Cameron. Writer was watching her lover, Keith, and his daughter, Violet, sing in the falling snow in a suburb of NYC. They were playing a game they played after dark in the first snowfall each year. Keith's ex-wife Judith, an anthropoligist, arrived. Judith always claimed she wanted to see more...

A Reporter at Large I-OFFSHORE by A. Alvarez. REPORTER AT LARGE about North Sea oil. In March, 1983, writer travelled from Aberdeen, Scotland to the Brent oil field, a distance of 300 miles. The Brent oil field is a Shell-Esso installation made up of four fixed drilling platforms: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta. Writer first visited the...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Theatre FOUL PLAY by Brendan Gill.

The Talk of the Town by John Bainbridge. Talk story about an auction at Christie's, in London, of "Finest and Rarest Wines," the crowning feature of which was a hand-blown bottle engraved "1787 Lafitte Th. J." and believed by a number of wine experts to have been part of an order placed in 1790 by Thomas Jefferson...

Poetry A Pear Like a Potato by John Updike. Was it worms, having once bitten...

Poetry Near the Desert Test Sites by Sherod Santos. Unlike almost everything/ Else just surviving here...

Poetry The Flutist by Dick Allen. My dreamy cousin, I see you standing on a ledge...