HEART SONGS AND OTHER STORIES by E. Annie Proulx (Harper & Row: $7.95)

E. Annie Proulx’s sentences evoke the spare granite landscapes of rural New England, where her stories take place. The title story is a devastating portrait of an aspiring country musician who has neither talent nor ambition, just dreams of easy money and celebrity. In the melancholy “Stone City,” a newcomer to a tiny Vermont town befriends a forlorn widower and uncovers the mystery of his unbearable memories. Proulx writes with a rare grace that never calls attention to itself but leaves the reader to savor such phrases as, “ . . . the afternoon light had a dying, year’s end quality, a rich apricot color as though it fell through a cordial glass onto an oak table, the kind of day hunters remember falsely as October.”