Books by John Updike.

The Talk of the Town View by William McKibben. Talk story about photographer Laura Rosen & Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. The park is celebrating its 50th anniversary as a city park. A party included a showing of her photographs of the rugged park, whose heights command a noble Jersey view. "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave this land...

Fiction Halloween by William Steig. Ten Halloween drawings...

A Reporter at Large THE CRAZY LIFE by Bill Barich. A REPORTER AT LARGE about youth gangs in the San Fernando Valley, of which Los Angeles County is a part... The agency that writer reported through, Community Youth Gang Services Project, a private, nonprofit organization that was established in 1981, tries to keep gang members in the Valley from killing...

The Theatre LITERARY PURSUIT by Brendan Gill.

The Talk of the Town Ice Age by Henry S. F. Cooper. Talk story about visit to the preview of a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, called "Dark Caves, Bright Visions" which has now opened. It is about life in Ice Age Europe; it establishes that in the Upper Paleolithic, from thirty-five thousand years ago until ten...

Comment by Harold Brodkey. A friend writes: Some people were recently sitting in a room being nice to one another, here in NYC & someone said to the woman whose apartment it was that the room's dark rugs & light furniture were pretty; & she said she had discovered that now there was white...

Profiles HISTORIAN by David Plante. PROFILE of Sir Steven Runciman, the historian. Writer first went to visit Sir Steven with a publisher friend, who had commissioned from Sir Steven a book on Mistra, the Byzantine capital in the Peloponnese. Sir Steven hopes he made the Greeks a little more aware of Byzantium than they had...

The Talk of the Town Gap by Lillian Ross. A talk story about the Norwegian rock group a-ha, and a concert writer attended at Radio City Music Hall... Pal Waaktar is the composer-lyricist and electric-guitar player for the group... The Pal Waaktar composed song "Take on Me" was the number for their first music video...

Fiction Flat Creek Road by John Bennet. Narrator recalls growing up in East Texas in a house on Flat Creek Road, with his mother, brother, and sister. His father, who turned out to be a drunk, lived away from his family taking various construction jobs all over. Although his mother had been the salutorian of one of...

The Current Cinema SCORSESE'S SHOWMANSHIP by Pauline Kael.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Around City Hall The Rites of Fall by Andy Logan. In March of this year when it was clear that early revelations of local municipal corruption, which first broke in January, were just the preliminary phase of a historical political scandal, Gov. Mario Cuomo invited Mayor Edward Koch to join him in establishinga State-City Commission on Integrity in Government...

Poetry What We Don't Know About Each Other by Lawrence Raab. In the next room my youngest daughter...