The Talk of the Town Idea by Mark Singer. Talk story about Robert Sparks, a full-time inventor who has recently patented the portable upright-sleeping device. He demonstrated it in his apartment on East 14th St., near Union Square. The prototype was a Styrofoam box with a contoured base that fitted over his thighs. Mr. Sparks, in his...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. When the American hostages were released from Iran, the headlines sang out "FREEDOM"... We saw fifty-two lively, cheerful, unconstrained free-men and women...streaming across the runway in Algeria. And in the tearful, joyful faces of the families and friends in the U.S., too, we could read the meaning...

The Current Cinema by Pauline Kael. Review of Roman Polanski's version of Thomas Hardy's novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". The film is called "Tess...

The Talk of the Town Experiment by James Stevenson. Talk story about a friend who lists what he saw on the sidewalk by walking slowly along and looking down. He chose a twenty-foot section of sidewalk (north side of Eighty-first Street west of Columbus). He lists ten items, among them: a return envelope for the New York...

U. S. Journal AMONG FRIENDS by Calvin Trillin. U.S. JOURNAL: SAVANNAH, GA., about the events surrounding the kidnapping and death of George Mercer IV. Mercer was the 22-year-old member of a distinguished Savannah family, the lineage of which goes back to colonial days. He disappeared on Jan. 29, 1980, and soon after that his parents received...

Around City Hall AROUND CITY HALL A HOUSE DIVIDED by Andy Logan. Tells about a recently published book "City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America", by Gunther Earth. It points out that many significant big-city developments originated in N.Y. The glory of the cities of the Midwest and Northeast which he wrote about, is now declining...

The Theatre Supping on Horrors by Edith Oliver.

The Talk of the Town The Christian Tradition by Lincoln Caplan. Talk story about Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale. He has heeded the call of his Czechoslovakian Lutheran heritage and committed himself to scholarship and teaching. He teaches both basic and esoteric courses related to his life's preoccupation, which is also the subject of his 5-volume life's...

Fiction The Return by Edna O'Brien. A woman has been vacationing alone on an island somewhere in the Mediterranean. She is flying back home. She succeeded in not thinking about her lover, a married man. She would sit on her terrace and think how she was free of him. From the island she could see two...

Books Dynasts by Naomi Bliven.

Fiction Smart Money by Philip Roth. Nathan Zuckerman is a writer trying to cope with the instant celebrity he has achieved since the publication of his book "Carnovsky" and the cover story done on him in Life magazine. It is the spring of 1969; Zuckerman is on a Fifth Avenue bus, heading downtown to visit his...

Musical Events Votaries by Nicholas Kenyon.

Poetry Salvage by Amy Clampitt. Daily the cortege of crumpled...

Poetry Clearing the Title by James Merrill. Because the wind has changed, because I guess...