NONE TOO STRAIGHT

That was the course followed by the family Helene Stapinski, a former resident of Jersey City, who in her first book, a family memoir, chronicles a family steeped in crime and devious dealings over three generations. She sent a query letter and the first six chapters of what sounds like a real-life Sopranos saga to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at Virginia Barber, who found it so "hilarous and self-aware" that she called and took her on the spot. Then off went proposal and chapters to Random's Ann Godoff (personally delivered just before she left for the Labor Day weekend holiday), who in turn found it so engrossing she "called from her car, just like in Hollywood," as Walsh described it. "I felt I just had to have it." said Godoff. "It's so funny, and serious, and true." The book, to be called Five-Fingered Discount, was bought for a mid-six figures. Stapinski, a freelance journalist who has written for People and the New York Times, actually got as far as Alaska in her flight from Jersey and her crooked forebears, but she is now safely ensconced in Brooklyn.

DARK PASSAGE

When you're a healthy young man, a former Junior Olympic hockey player also keen on tennis and in-line skating, and your masculine sex drive begins to dwindle, what do you do? In the case of Ken Baker, a veteran People writer who is now the magazine's San Francisco correspondent, you worry, you go to specialists, even a psychiatrist. But nothing seemed to help (and this was well before the days of Viagra). Finally, it began to look as though Baker was beginning to change physically into a woman. When his problem was finally diagnosed, after 10 increasingly anxious years, it was found to be a benign brain tumor that had set off the discharge of a high level of female hormones in his body, severely reducing his testosterone levels. The tumor removed, he sprang back to life -- and is in fact getting married soon. The whole story, of his "lost years" and the suffering attached to male erectile dysfunction, will be told in A Man Made: A Memoir of Manhood, which his agent, Jane Dystel, has sold to David Groff of Tarcher. Baker noted that "there is no book speaking to and for men suffering from the impotence that affects about 30 million American men of all ages. The audience also includes women who will learn about the male condition."

NEVER TOO LATE

Not content with having helped father the current craze for seagoing adventure narrative (with My Old Man and the Sea, co-written with his son, Daniel, and published by Algonquin in 1995), David Hays decided, in his late 60s, that since he had never been bar mitzvahed, now was as good a time as any. So this former Broadway designer, who had built sets for Balanchine and who founded the Theatre for the Deaf, sat down and took instruction with a group of 12-year-olds. He has now written a memoir around this experience and his life, which agent Martha Kaplan sent simultaneously to both Jane Rosenman at Scribner and David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster. "It reduced my assistant to tears," said Rosenman. "And when I read it, it reduced me to tears, too." Rosenthal is made of sterner stuff, but since he also wanted the book, what Rosenman calls "a Solomonic solution" was devised. They made a joint preemptive bid: S&S will publish, while Rosenman, who says she will bring "great passion" to the project, will edit. No title as yet, but the book, which is finished, is scheduled for fall 2000.

REMEMBERING CELESTINE

The name of Celestine Sibley is a resonant one in her native South, where the novelist, memoirist and syndicated columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut a wide swath until her death last month. Now little Hill Street Press In Athens, Ga., has signed Celestine Sibley Fleming to write a memoir of her grandmother for publication next April. It will be called Celestine Sibley: An Affectionate Reminiscence of a Life Well Lived, and, according to Hill Street publisher Tom Payton, will be an account of Fleming's grandmother both as a public figure and family matriarch. (Sibley often wrote about Fleming as she was growing up.) The book will have never-before published pictures as well as family recipes. And it's part of a two-book deal, which also includes Fleming's first novel. No agent was involved: they do these things differently in the South.

PLAYTIME

The area where technology and play intersect, the world of children's software and play stations, will be mapped in The Playful World, a title just bought by Ballantine's Peter Borland in a six-figure world rights deal with agent Ira Silverberg at Donadio & Olson. The author is Mark Pesce, who co-invented a programming language that permits three-dimensional display on the Web and is also director of interactive media at USC's cinema and TV school. According to Silverberg, "It will uncover the shift in the way our children look at the world and explain to parents how the world their children will grow up in is entirely different from their own." Publication is set for next September to coincide with the introduction of Sony's PlayStation 2.

SHORT TAKES

Historical adventure novelist Bernard Cornwell is a big bestseller in his native U.K., and HarperCollins's Dan Conaway hopes that with his Stonehenge, just signed via Ed Breslin acting on behalf of Britain's Toby Eady, the same will happen here. The book is due out over there next month and will appear here next year. Meanwhile, Cornwell's Sharpe's Triumph, part of a series, is about to appear here, along with several paperback Sharpe reissues.....David Smith of DHS Literary in Dallas, has sold to Henry Holt's Emilia Sheldon and president John Sterling, in a six-figure deal, a book on the evolutionary roots of nutrition by Elizabeth Somer, nutrition consultant on Good Morning, America...P try written at the age of 19 by the late rap king Tupac Shakur has been acquired by Pocket's Tracy Sherrod for MTV Books, a joint imprint of Pocket and MTV. The book, The Rose That Grew from Concrete, was bought from Jack Horner at ICM for publication in November.