The Talk of the Town Balance by Mary D. Kierstead. Talk story about strolling down West Broadway on Saturday afternoon, writer meets a young woman and three men carrying a board with a large cake on it in the shape of a cruise ship/tugboat. The woman, Nancy Frank, had baked it; she pays the rent by making out-size...

Musical Events Waves by Nicholas Kenyon.

Profiles A. VAST MINORITY by Whitney Balliett. PROFILE of Mel Torme. At fifty-five, Mel Torme has been a professional singer for fifty years. He knows over five thousand songs, and never forgets them. He has written three hundred songs of his own. Recently he has been appearing at a nightclub called Marty's on the East Side...

The Theatre Saluting the Duke by Edith Oliver.

The Talk of the Town Collectible by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about a visit to the 37th National Antiques Show at Madison Square Garden. Writer talked to Harold Navratil, who showed her a shelf of prehistoric Danish stone knives, daggers and scrapers...

Comment Comment (Part 3) by Susan Lardner. A happy man in shirtsleeves steers a tractor between a blooming bed of flowers and a clump of sunlit greenery. A blond moppet crouches in rich, dark soil to gather perfect leaves of lettuce. Voluptuous beefsteak tomatoes, luscious yellow squash, and fleshy musk-melons flaunt their charms. Or that is...

Fiction Uncles by Thomas Glynn. There were four uncles who gathered at the family summer house each year on Labor Day. One was an apologetic skinny accountant, one worked for a used car dealer, a third ran a hardware store in Cadillac, and the fourth owned a cheese factory. The uncles liked to tell the...

Fiction To See You Again by Alice Adams. A woman in her thirties teaches for a semester at a college named Conford, east of San Francisco. In her class is a thin, red-haired boy named Seth, toward whom she is attracted; she feels silly being attracted to someone so much younger. On the day of her last...

Books Understanding Ashberry by John Updike.

A Reporter at Large EARLY DAYS by Elizabeth Drew. REPORTER AT LARGE about the efforts by the new Reagan Administration to maneuver successfully through the early phase of the Presidency. Although there is often talk of "a honeymoon" when a new President takes office, what really occurs is that a line of credit is extended to the new President...

Fiction A Painful Affair by Mavis Gallant. A satire about a rivalry between two writers, Henri Grippes, a bohemian Parisian, and Victor Prism, an Englishman, which centers on the centenary commemoration of the late Mary Margaret Pugh. Prism is selected to preside at the ceremony; both he and Grippes think Grippes should have been chosen since Grippes...

Comment Comment (Part 2) by John Brooks. The talk of the moment in economic circles, and particularly in government economic circles, is Arthur Laffer and his Laffer Curve, which provides the theoretical basis for President Reagan's tax-cutting plans. Laffer is a forty-year-old professor at the University of Southern California Graduate School of Business Administration...

Comment Comment (Part 1) by Jonathan Schell. When we turned on the CBS evening news one day recently, we were surprised to hear the broadcast begin with a story that was 26 years out of date: in 1955, Walter Cronkite informed us, the United States sent advisers to Vietnam. He went on to add what all his...

Poetry The Prodigal Son by Lois Moyles. Will he be half-old when he returns...

Poetry Murmur by Anthony Hecht. Look in thy heart, and write. -Sidney...

Poetry The Bat by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Reading in bed, full of sentiment...