HELL-BENT MEN AND THEIR CITIES <i> by Susan Dodd (Penguin: $8.95).</i>

The men and women in these terse stories find themselves caught between their fears and their desire to love and be loved. Life in contemporary, urban America fails to provide what they desire most passionately--the opportunity to express their affection and pain. In “Sinatra,” a daughter copes with the inexorable debility that age has brought to the father she once looked to as a source of strength. The most striking story in the collection is “Isometropia,” a double, internal monologue in which two women involved with the same man discover that the half-perceived image of the rival has eclipsed their lover in importance: “We dream of each other.”