Fiction Hack Wednesday by Margaret Atwood. Marcia, a lifestyles and socil issues writer for a Canadian newspaper, and who is now middleaged, has been dreaming about babies as Christmas draws near. Her husband, Eric, ecologically minded and a political reactionary, writes popular history. The grim aspects of the news (Panama, Noriega) reflect themselves in Marcia's columns...

Comment by Adam Gopnik. Comment about the similarities between Proust's house in Illiers, and writer's co-op on Broome Street. Proust's great subject, as every comp-lit major knows, was the marvellous correspondences in life--the way incidents and events that at first look like just a lot of unrelated stuff turn out, when...

The Talk of the Town Mr. Eggs by Susan Orlean. Talk story about Mr. Eggs, an egg and egg-product subsidiary of Dependable Food Products, of Kensington, New York whose new owner is Mrs. Mariana Deutsch, a former businesswoman in New York's garment district. She was encouraged by her son-in-law to buy the Mr. Eggs business a year...

Letter from Mexico City by Alma Guillermoprieto. Tells about the enormous garbage dumps on the outskirts of Mexico City, which are inhabited by communities of garbage pickers. Garbage has become an obsession for the inhabitants of Mexico City, the world's largest urban conglomerate. At least 14 tons of waste now float in what the city breathes every...

The Talk of the Town Welcome by Adam Gopnik. Talk story about finding an Iraqi government building on 80th Street, east of Park Avenue. On the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend, writer went for a long and generally aimless walk around the Upper East Side. Sometimes that part of town makes writer edgy and envious, but on Saturday...

Books by Naomi Bliven.

Profiles DIZZY by Whitney Balliett. PROFILE of Dizzy Gillespie, who was born in Cheraw. A while back he returned to his hometown when they had a Dizzy Gillespie day in his honor. When he tried to get a haircut before a cocktail party that the ex-mayor was giving in his honor, he discovered that...

The Talk of the Town Theremin, Theremin by George W. S. Trow. Talk story about theremins, (electronic musical instruments designed in 1918) and about Steve Martin, a theremin afficionado, who is planning a movie about a theremin player he met named Clara Rockmore. Rockmore's theremin, which was installed in her apartment by Professor Termen himself, was repaired, at Martin's behest, by Robert...

A Reporter at Large OUT THERE-II by William Finnegan. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the drug traffic in New Haven, CT. Writer interviews Terry Jackson, a teen-aged cocain and marijuana dealer, who is arrested twice in the course of the story, once for marijuana and once for cocaine-related drug-dealing. He would travel to New York with...

The Theatre SOAP WITHIN SOAP by Edith Oliver.

Poetry Signs and Portents by Katha Pollitt. Only natural, to put...

Poetry The Barber by Michael Collier. Even in death he roams the yard in his boxer shorts...

Poetry Frozen Charlottes by Susan Prospere. Far down into the dark reaches...