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The Tag Match

The two boys stood mute with the anticipation of commerce. Talmidge was giving them last-minute instructions. "Now, your business is to sell. Stay out from in front of the spectators. And don't ever just stand still watching the matches. Keep moving." "When do we get our nuts?" Nick asked. Talmidge ignored the question. He was…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O’Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Rosellen Brown Associate Fiction Editors Andre Dubus DeWitt Henry CONTRIBUTORS MICHAEL BENEDIKT currently teaches at Boston University. His latest book is Night Cries (Wesleyan, 1976), and the poem here is from a ms. in progress entitled, “The Badminton at Great Barrington; or, Gustave Mahler…

Uncle Nathan

When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, and during the years when I was first falling in love with books and girls, I used to imagine that my Uncle Nathan was twins. Even back then, I guess, his life was a great sadness to me. What I couldn't figure out was how a…

The Poetry of Anthony Hecht

The Nightingale What is it to be free? The unconfined Lose purpose, strength, and at the last, the mind. ANTHONY HECHT: a couplet to accompany Aesop The American poets who were born up and down the 1920s have come into their full powers and fame well before now, though the contours of some careers have…

Philip Roth

Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact…

The Cold

Butch, determined to wait out the cold, took a stool near the end of the bar, away from the cluster of regulars gathered where they could see the Motorola TV. His back was only two feet from the front window. He could feel the cold seeping through the glass, hear the mean wind off Lake…

Persistence

The leafless trees are feathery,      A foxed, Victorian lace, Against a sky of milk-glass blue,      Blank, washed-out, commonplace. Between them and my window      Huge helices of snow Perform their savage, churning rites      At seventeen below. The obscurity resembles      A silken Chinese mist Wherein through caligraphic daubs      Of artistry persist Pocked and volcanic gorges,      Clenched and…