HEAVEN LIES ABOUT by Maclin Bocock...

HEAVEN LIES ABOUT by Maclin Bocock (John Daniel & Co.: $9.; 71 pp., paperback original). Bocock’s first collection of short stories evokes the rural South during the Depression--the hot, dry fields and the cool, shadowy interiors. In “Don’t Save Your Kisses,” a scandal involving the new librarian rocks a small, Virginia town; “Play Me ‘Stormy Weather,’ Please” and “The Funeral” depict the pain of middle-class white children whose attempts to establish interracial friendships collide with unspoken but irrefrangible social barriers.