Many times since its rebirth last spring, the Advocate has helplessly thrown up its arms and sunk into the quicksands of adolescent as well as painfully esoteric writing, but now it seems to have arrived safely on firm, green ground. The current issue combines the magazine's previous virtues with a new one, short stories that are worth the type they use. Now the consistently fine poetry, drawings, and makeup all yield the spotlight to the place where it belongs-on the fiction.

Each of the three stories is at least as good and as readable as any that have appeared in the Advocate since the war. "What a Man Has to Do," by Harold Fleming, is a restrained tale of violence and race hatred that has no direct message. Prejudice and hate press harder and harder on Berry, the Negro Army sergeant, until he "flies apart like the works of an over wound clock." This is a real short story, so seldom seen hitherto around here, with real characters in real situations.

"Strength Is a Tower," by Robert Bly, and "Jazz Man," by James McGovern, are perhaps less distinguished examples of fiction writing than the lead story, but both are competent, meaty jobs. Bly's work, dealing with a man who can't stand his wife, gives a faintly amusing twist to a serious theme. The imagery is precise, bold, and unpretentious, as "Making himself speak to her was like biting into something spoiled and sour." "Jazz Man" is old stuff (a washed-up musician tries to bide the fact from himself), but that doesn't matter, for the telling is fresh and exciting. Here too violence plays its part, and so does sentiment, and here too both are nicely restrained.

For those interested, the usual good poetry appears, this time by John Ashbery and Ora May Hulli; same with the criticism, by Kenneth Koch ad Robert Hunter. Now, with a well-balanced issue, there is no need to say nice things about these lost. Of course the fiction has its flaws, but they are the same kind of shortcomings that can be found in the works of any good writer, not the puerile once generally found in college literary magazines. The excellence of this issue may be due to its inevitable growth, or it may be just an accident. Give a burnt offering that it is not the latter.