THESE THINGS HAPPEN <i> by Marian Thurm (Washington Square: $7.95)</i>

Marian Thurm’s prose has a straightforward clarity that captures the essential details of her character’s lives in these wry short stories. In “Sanctuary,” a gay man, stuck at the bar mitzvah of his lover’s only son, finds an unexpected ally in his lover’s ex-wife; a divorcee struggles to overcome her father’s conviction that she’s messing up yet again when she decides to marry for a second time in “Flying.” Thurm notes the follies and neuroses of daily life in urban America with the seemingly innocent fascination of a child watching the inhabitants of an ant farm.