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Repent! Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia H (Addison-Wesley) is the true story of DENNIS COVINGTON'S exploration of a group of snakehandling Pentecostal Christians. Descended from rural Alabamian serpent fondlers, Covington is drawn back to cover the trial of a reptilian preacher accused of trying to off his wife with the tools of his trade. While researching his strychnine-chugging, blowtorchwielding kin, the writer finds himself genuinely moved by the spirit to take up serpents.

Also this month: East, West (Pantheon) is SALMAN RUSHDIE'S first collection of short stories and his first major work since the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa forced him into hiding. In Nine Parts of Desire (Anchor), GERALDINE BROOKS takes a peek behind the veil of Islamic women and finds the face of a peculiar feminism. Former president JIMMY CARTER, in the tradition of former presidents Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, pens a volume of poetry,

Always a Reckoning (Times Books). All the Days and Nights (Knopf) is more than 50 years' worth of short stories by WILLIAM MAXWELL, a modern master of the form. Journalist FRANCOISE GIROUD and philosopher BERNARD-HENRI LEVY lock horns in the provocative Women and Men: A Philosophical Conversation (Little, Brown). Actress FIONA LEWIS is the mastermind responsible for the giddy Hollywood novel Between Men (Atlantic Monthly Press). National Book Award winner PETE DEXTER _ delivers The Paperboy (Random House), a gritty new novel set in Florida that pits a county newspaperman against his rebellious sons. Between Friends (Harcourt Brace) is the correspondence of HANNAH ARENDT and MARY MCCARTHY, in which the intellectual gal pals dish gossip and dissect politics. And because January is the season for making those loathsome New Year's resolutions, we offer you BEAUCHAMP COLCLOUGH'S Tomorrow I'll Be Different: The Effective Way to Stop Drinking (Overlook Press). Cheers!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL