The Talk of the Town Wooden Boats by Charles McGrath. Talk story about going to Rhode Island to visit the second annual Wooden Boat Show, a four-day affair held outdoors at the Newport Yachting Center. Writer extimates that there were some forty builders at the show, almost all with examples of their work. Tells about a number of smaller...

The Talk of the Town Peace by Lawrence Weschler. Talk story about Mikhail Ostrovsky, one of 11 independent Moscow peace activists. The writer interviewed Ostrovsky at the offices of the Helsinki Watch Committee...

The Talk of the Town Impressions by William McKibben. Talk story about an audition of Jerry Lewis impersonators at the Guild Rehearsal studios at the Ansonia Hotel. The auditions are handled by Charles Kaufman, who explains that Tower Films International needs a few dozen Jerry Lewises for an upcoming spoof of nature films that he is directing, called "The...

Around City Hall AROUND CITY HALL CHANGING SIDES by Andy Logan. Businessman Lewis Lehrman is running for Governor of N.Y. on the Republican ticket. He strongly supported Reagan at the 1980 Republican National Convention, where he was chairman of the Platform Committee. Later he made an intense effort to win appointment as the new Administration's Secretary of the Treasury, for which...

Memory Hellfire and All That by M. F. K. Fisher. Story about narrator's grilhood in Whittier, California aroun 1917 and her memory of two Billies: Billy Sunday the hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist, and slender, shadowy Billy who was a pimp and the boyfried of Rose, the family cook. Rose comes to live with the family partly because her friend Billy...

Comment by Lois Metzger. Shortly before ten o'clock this past Monday morning, there was a butterfly in the lowest level of the West Fourth Street subway station. The only people waiting, a young woman in a prairie skirt and a middle-aged man in pinstripes stood staring at the butterfly--it was orange-and...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents HONG KONG DREAM by Calvin Trillin. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about the writer's visit to Hong Kong. He is an experienced patron of NYC's Chinatown restaurants, dreams about how food is prepared in Hong Kong, and finally manages to travel there and find out. Hong Kong restaurants, he believes, will prepare the finest Chinese food possible...

Books Kissinger and Nixon by William Pfaff.

Letter from Europe by Jane Kramer. There are a number of fine exhibits in Paris presently. Delacroix's watercolors and drawings are now in the Pavillon de Flore at the Louvre marking the 150th anniversary of his Morocco trip. At the Beaubourg there is a Tanguy retrospective and a Braque retrospective. Braque's mythological drawings are at the...

The Theatre A BEAST IN CHAINS by Brendan Gill.

Fiction A Flying Start by Mavis Gallant. Story which satirizes both the French literary bureaucracy and the tradition of artistic patronage. After beginning and abandoning several projects, the Ministry of Culture decides to back the Angliciste, a work which includes a section on British authors known for their slavish allegiance to France. The young and promising Henri...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) The Truth of Appearances by Calvin Tomkins.

Annals of the Former World I-IN SUSPECT TERRAIN by John McPhee. ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD about geology, especially the life and work of geologist Anita Harris. She is now a conodont specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Detailed account of her research on conodonts which are hard fragments of the bodies of unknown marine creatures. She crushed rock found in...

Poetry The Quoit by W. S. Merwin. The iron ring...