The Talk of the Town Tiger Tops by David Roe. Talk story about the Royal Chitwan national park in Nepal, and the Tiger Tops tourist lodge, which is located there. The park is a 360-square-mile patch of grasslands and jungle near the border with India, at the upper edge of the great Ganges plain. Its population includes over...

An Australian Childhood A VERANDA ON A CORNER OF A CONTINENT by Joan Colebrook. AN AUSTRALIAN CHILDHOOD about growing up in Australia in the nineteen-twenties. Writer's home was on the Atherton Tableland, on the edge of the Great Dividing Range in North Queensland. Everywhere, in those days, was the backdrop of the rain forest...

Letter from Europe by Jane Kramer. Tells about the plight of the individual French farmer today in light of competition from other countries, both in and out of the Common Market. Tells about Fernande Pelletier (pseud.), who owns a small farm that she runs with her husband. Describes her family and social life. They grow tobacco...

Books by Naomi Bliven.

Comment by Lawrence Weschler. A young friend, thinking about arms control talks between the U.S. and Russia, writes. When he was a kid he lived near one of the first McDonald's hamburger stands in Los Angeles. There was a banner across the arches indicating how many had been served. The number increased all the...

The Talk of the Town The Secretary by Lincoln Caplan. Talk story about Robert McC. Adams, the new, 58-year-old Secretary of Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution. As Secretary he directs the Smithsonian's 13 museums (ranging from the National Air and Space Museum to the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, in N.Y., the National Zoological Park, and six...

Fiction Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg. The narrator was having a drink with her date in New York when Ivan called from Montreal, asking her to meet him there. She flew to Montreal the next morning. She remembered how many planes, buses, and trains she'd taken over the past nine years to meet her lover, Ivan...

Fiction She Unnames Them by Ursula K. Le Guin. Most of them accepted namelessness with the indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. A faction of yaks protested. They said that “yak” sounded right. They discussed the matter all summer. The council of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful...

Poetry Ode to Crystallization by John Updike. The atom is a crystal/of a sort...

Poetry The Almond Tree by Yves Bonnefoy. Fire, the joys of split sap. /Rain, or maybe just wind on...