Comment by Alma Guillermoprieto. Comment about the peace agreement in El Salvador. The official figure being quoted in all the news stories on how many people were killed in the twelve year war within El Salvador is 75,000. On Feb. 1, under the terms of an accord negotiated by a United Nations peace commission...

The Talk of the Town Matchmaker by Holly Brubach. Talk story about Dr. Barbara Chasen, who three years ago founded a dating service called the Introductions Club; her clients regard her as New York City's foremost Jewish feminist matchmaker. Her service has brought together fifteen couples so far. A full-time psychoanalyst, she will not accept a patient as...

The Talk of the Town The Guy Who Caught the Ball by Richard Cohen. Talk story about Eli Ganias, who caught a foul ball at Shea Stadium last summer. The writer talked with him in the front room of Rusty Staub's on Fifth--the midtown eatery owned by the former Mets right fielder. Eli imagines opening a restaurant called The Guy Who Caught the...

The Talk of the Town Conspiracy Theory by Susan Orlean. Talk story from an intermittently paranoid friend who encountered two Kennedy half dollars, after not having seen one in ten years; got a hair cut that a friend said made her look like one of the Kennedy girls; heard people mention the writers William Kennedy and Kennedy Fraser; and saw...

Fiction Keiretsu by George W. S. Trow. The piece is headed with a transcript of Wyatt Andrews and Dennis Gormley discussing the Keiretsu (the Japanese corporate cartel) on the "CBS Evening News." The narrator, an old man living at the Hotel Subaltern, gives a rambling monologue from 9 p.m., Sunday, until 3 a.m., Monday. He says the...

Fiction The Little Heart by Jean Thompson. Benny, 44, a sculptor, and her lover Pete, 26, a graduate student in microbiology, are touring the South, driving from Wisconsin to New Orleans. Though both Benny and Pete look younger than they are, she knows that their affair will not last. A talkative, hard-drinking woman, Benny has been...

Report from Ukraine by Robert Cullen. Tells about Yuri Shcherbak, 57, born in the Ukraine. At the end of 1986 he helped found Green World, an environmental party & non-Communist. In June, 1991, the chairman of the presidium of the Ukrainian legislature, a Communist named Leonid Kravchuk, decided he wanted to give the public the...

The Theatre THE DESPICABLE RACE by Mimi Kramer.

The Current Cinema FIXED ORBITS by Terrence Rafferty.

Around City Hall The Unpeaceable Kingdom by Andy Logan. The first meeting of the newly elected City Council was held on Jan. 8th. As provided for in the new city charter, it has 51 members, compared with 35 in the Council it succeeds. Among those sworn in were the Council's first two openly gay members--Thomas Duane, from Greenwich...

A Critic at Large A WOMAN'S PLACE by Claudia Roth Pierpont. A CRITIC AT LARGE about writer Olive Schreiner and her work, focussing mainly on "The Story of an African Farm," published in 1883... Tells about a long political allegory she completed in 1896 based on Cecil Rhodes' most recent and brutal retaliations against uprisings of the Matabele and the Mashona...

The Film File Father of the Bride by Michael Sragow. This scene-by-scene remake, with Steve Martin in the Spencer Tracy role of the father racking up debts to give his daughter a big marital sendoff, is less credible and crunchy than the 1950 Vincente Minnelli production. The story was always just a mildly satirical ode to middle-class patriarchy and the...

The Film File Madame Bovary by Michael Sragow. Calling writer-director Claude Chabrol’s adaptation of this Gustave Flaubert classic Masterpiece Theatre-style moviemaking is unfair to Masterpiece Theatre: the BBC miniseries starring Francesca Annis and Tom Conti had more humor, grit, and oomph. This is the Classics Illustrated comic-book version. In two hours and eight minutes, it trots through the...

Poetry Gomorrah by Christine Holbo. Also, in Gomorrah, there were plays...

Poetry Red House by Rachel Hadas. Malevich painted you. Can I come in...

Poetry Here by Mark Strand. The sun that slivers all the buildings here...