HEART SONGS AND OTHER STORIES by...

HEART SONGS AND OTHER STORIES by E. Annie Proulx (Scribner: $10; 203 pp.). This collection of short stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Shipping News” focuses on the conflict between the long-time blue-collar residents of rural New England and yuppies eager to acquire second homes in the scenic hills. The women in “Electric Arrows” summarize the participants in this low-key range war as “those hard grey men who ate deer meat in every season and could fix whatever was broken again and again until nothing was left of the original machine but its function” and “those believers that country life makes you good. When they find it does not, they spitefully sell the land again, to Venezuelan millionaires, Raytheon engineers, cocaine dealers and cold-handed developers.”