Matthew Klam knows what guys really think about such things as failure, anxiety, and the way they like their female attributes--breasts (firm), hipbones (jutting), facial hair (nonexistent). These foibles and fetishes are specific to guys, not men--that is, grown boys struggling to become grown-ups. Now Klam's tales of fragile, horny men, and the brittle marriages and strained vacations that undo them, are gathered in a collection titled Sam the Cat and Other Stories (Random House). While the author seems to dwell in the realm of self-pitying maledom, he's really bent on exposing how guys wind up more shatterd than ever when they objectify women and wallow in existential angst. The story that closes this ruthlessly insightful debut, "European Wedding," revesals that Klam has a major bead on women. When a mother nurses her three-year-old and shuns her spouse, Klam writes, "Since the birth of her son, the sight of her husband's pink backside as he walked to the bath before bed was enough to destroy her." Another woman thinks to herself, "She might have been Clinton's first female Deputy Director of Communications if she hadn't had that long, beat, flat Fiona Apple hair in the interview." We can more than relate. --Katherine Dieckmann