THE RAILWAY POLICE AND THE LAST TROLLEY RIDE

In the first of these two novellas, Miss Calisher is more recognizable— it is less cabalistic than her most recent Journal from Ellipsia, but it has much of the highstrung, rather elegant flair associated with a good deal of her writing. In it a beautiful, but bald, social worker of middle years retraces some of her earlier history, all connected with the fact of her inheritance as a rather rare genetic sport which leaves her not only hairless but also manless— a lover faces her total nudity aghast and sends her a Picasso as a parting gift. Now, shedding her past, and her headpieces, she is ready to "desert everything... to greet all there is." It's a rather fascinating, fetishistic parable of reality and evasion. The Last Trolley Ride is something very different, almost twice as long, and until its twisted finale, half as interesting, as an old man commemoratively reviews the past in a small upstate New York town. Here a man keeps a model of the tramway system which has broken him in his basement, while above ground it now comes to a dead end. And there's also the double-tracked romance between two men off a barge and two sisters. The story, simply, ruminatively remembered, ends on a note of shattering sexual horror..... Reviews will be there—but readers