Bookshelf: Two biting ladies - 'Snakewoman' and Bernhardt

Blend one anthropologist, one young woman fresh out of prison for shooting her husband, and that husband, a Pentecostal pastor from a serpent-handling church, and watch their lives twist around one another. You are in "Hellengaville," searching for your lost shaker of angst. The characters in Robert Hellenga's "Snakewoman of Little Egypt" (Bloomsbury, $25), perpetually reinvent themselves and reconnect with one another in new ways. We find ourselves in the backwoods of Illinois, in a world most of us probably will (thankfully) never enter. Sunny, who has a gift for handling serpents, married Earl, a wife beater, when she was 16. After doing time for shooting him in the shoulder, she meets Jackson, back from Africa and searching for the subject of his next academic paper. In the process of persuading Earl to divorce, Sunny introduces Jackson to the world of snake-handling - to her former church, the Church of the Burning Bush With Signs Following. Soon, Jackson, who has a history of going native, is in deeper than he should be. Hellenga makes anthropologists of us all.

She was the original drama queen, though it is hard, once you know about her childhood, not to ascribe the flamboyance to a need to survive (If I throw myself under the carriage, my mother / aunt / benefactor might not leave me). In "Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt" (Yale University Press, $25), Robert Gottlieb is true to the mystery of his subject's self-invented life. He also does what few biographers of famous women do: He focuses on her work. Her life moves from play to play, not lover to lover (but don't worry, they're in here, too). Molière, Victor Hugo, Racine - these were her steppingstones. Bernhardt's own memoir, "My Double Life," takes us only through age 35 (the actress died in 1923 at 78 - if, as a resigned Gottlieb acknowledges, she was born in 1844). Famous jokes about her thinness - "When she takes a bath, the level of the water goes down" - and insights about her Jewishness - in the years of the Dreyfus affair, particularly - are vintage Gottlieb. "She was a star," he writes, "or she was nothing."

"This book is the story of what I learned about the Chinese language, and what the language taught me about China," writes Deborah Fallows in "Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language" (Walker & Co., $22). Fallows, a veteran traveler and wife of James Fallows (journalist and Asian specialist), untangles the complex relationships between a visitor to another culture, a language and the culture of the country she is visiting. Fallows has a good ear for aspect, the way of stressing certain words and syllables to change or add layers of meaning to a simple word or phrase. Playfulness, respect, affection and the virtues of solidarity with the common people - a different traveler might miss all these, but not Fallows. In her effort to understand the real people of China, she finds herself looking for bargains, shopping at a drugstore (its nickname is "the pricekiller") and a Shanghai Walmart. In the frenzy for bargains, Fallows catches herself dreaming in Mandarin, returning home victorious with three giant jars of mustard and this close to dragging a couple of questionable free pork shanks back to her apartment on the 22nd floor.

In the bad old days (for example, when James Salter's novel "Light Years" was published in 1975), we argued about how bourgeois he was, what a gorgeous writer, but so taken up with things of this world: "Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue-checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives." Now, such arguments seem luxurious. So much has disappeared. Letters always make the reader feel this way, and the ones written between Hamptons resident Salter and critic Robert Phelps are no exception. Read some 200 of them, written over 20 years, in "Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps," edited by John McIntyre (Counterpoint, $25). There are shadows: Phelps' bisexuality, hidden behind a 40-year marriage; Salter's struggles with his writing. And then, the terrible fact that Phelps died of colon cancer in 1989 after just one neglected novel. These letters seem so very affectionate, evidence of how a lifelong conversation can help two friends grow toward their best selves.