The tie that binds men and women, that makes men do absurd things that they will very likely be sorry for later, is at the center of this prize-winning collection of stories. There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love-badly and madly in love-with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can't think. He eats, but it doesn't taste like...