By James Lasdun
240 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

If you listen, you can almost hear it ticking: the time bomb of anxiety, or delayed gratification, or fear, or deflected love, in any one of the artfully told stories in James Lasdun's latest collection, It's Beginning to Hurt. "Whatever you did," thinks the weary, wary husband in "An Anxious Man," "it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner." Intimate, sometimes wryly comforting tales of tenderness and rue.

— Cathleen Medwick