Of Cats and Men, as the 10 stories are collectively titled, presents these themes from the female viewpoint: a more accurate title (though she’d lose the Steinbeck reference) might have been Getting To Know Such Strange Beasts. As you might expect, the protagonists in de Gramont’s deft portraits tend to begin by feeling a little closer to the smaller, fur-covered creatures than to the human ones, and sometimes they end that way as well. In " The Wedding Bed, " new bride Camille starts out much more comfortable with her Persian, Penny, than with her working-class husband, Joe, who has brought her to a frightening and possibly unsafe home. In " Lieutenant’s Island, " the free-spirited Tara’s relationship with Pagan seems to have outlasted both her marriages.

Brief as they are, however, these stories don’t exist in stasis. De Gramont’s people blossom, separate, and learn to love again and again, and often their cats act as catalysts for emotional growth. In " Human Contact, " a former barn cat brings city girl Beth a bit closer to accepting the paradoxes of personality that have severed her ties with rancher Charlie. In " The Closest Place, " the pregnant and vulnerable Tessa finds herself unable to communicate with her husband, Ben, about her anxieties concerning his mentally ill brother. When those anxieties play out in the fate of her beloved Sancho, she is forced to express those feelings — and face their repercussions.

As " Human Contact " and " The Closest Place " indicate, many of these stories deal with loss, and a slight pall of melancholy does color de Gramont’s collection. Except for " The Closest Place " and the heartbreaking " In His Shoes " (in which a cat is incidental to a murder), this is a quiet sadness. Musing over the old wives’ tales about cats and babies in " Stealing Babies’ Breath, " new mother Caroline recalls a pre-pregnancy outing with her husband and savors her nostalgia for the simpler crises of that time: " She remembers deeply wishing she could just stay there on the islet, rejoicing in her safety, never touching water again. . . . She would have given anything not to cross again, but stay, leaning against Chris — her rescuer. "

Sometimes, because of the male-female pairings in these stories, the sadness revolves around break-ups and lost love. "  ‘I did the right thing,’ I said. My footsteps tapped out a tentative rhythm, trying to assuage my remorse, " says Beth, recalling her split from Charlie. Sometimes that same, soft melancholy brings people closer: " They would kiss, in that next instant. Not, Tara realized, because either of them had changed. But because, alone in a room together, there was nothing else for them to do. "

Unlike the battles between the sexes in the works of the more callow new " chick lit " writers, the skirmishes here rarely escalate into all-out war. De Gramont focuses instead on the little conflicts, the misread cues of a lover who, say, can no more give up his cheesy pornography than his cat can stop killing birds but who loves his fiancée nonetheless. More often, the misunderstandings involve the confused promptings of the protagonists’ own hearts, as when Mia, in " By His Wild Lone, " learns to let go, finally seeing herself as one who " battles against what’s best left to fate and nature. " Such is the case in " The Politeness of Kings, " in which the refined Anne opens her story by declaring: " I fell in love with Dante the night he told me about breaking bottles off Stone’s Bluff. " Coming from a straitlaced family, she relishes the habits of her lover’s wilder clan, in which the children would break blue bottles in winter in order to harvest the sand- and water-polished seaglass the following summer. Restraining her own fears, her own conflicts about loving and letting go, proves harder, but she too learns how, even if in her case it means locking away an unhappy feline before diving into the water.