History is on the side of writer Kevin Baker. His period novel, “Dreamland,” just sold to Birkin, Leonardo diCaprio’s fledgling film production company for an undisclosed amount. “Let’s just say I’m very satisfied,” says the 40-year-old New York native. Baker, the chief researcher on Harold Evans’ “The American Century,” completed two novels while working on the power publisher’s nine-year project. The first, published in 1993, was called “Sometimes You See It Coming” and based on the life of baseball slugger Ty Cobb. The most recent, “Dreamland,” which takes its title from a burned-down amusement park in Coney Island, was published only last month.

Set at the turn of the century, the novel’s walk-ons by famous and semifamous historical figures — from Freud to Big Tim Sullivan — have inspired comparisons to E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it “brilliantly imagined and assiduously researched.” Not every review has been kind, though. Newsday’s Chris Lehmann excoriated the book, saying that “no convincing human situation has sprouted from the novel’s accumulated mass of historical detail.” Hmmm … sounds like a certain gazillion-dollar cinematic blockbuster we know.

DiCaprio, meanwhile, is in Thailand finishing up the film version of the Alex Garland novel “The Beach,” where the production has been cause of great wrath among environmentalists.

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If your literary dreams include studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa, you may want to dream again. The famed M.F.A. program has nurtured some of the best, it’s true, including recent alumnus and lit world darling Nathan Englander. According to Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops series, however, Iowa ranks a few notches below a surprise number one, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

For the last three years, Scribner’s has put together collections of short stories plucked from M.A. and M.F.A. programs in the U.S and Canada. (This year’s editon comes out on April 14.) Series editor John Kulka says that the decision to include a story is made strictly on merit with no attempt to be “representational.” “We choose these stories blindly,” he says. Surveying all three collections, Salon added up the number of stories selected from each program. Michigan came in first with four. Though Iowa ranks in the middle, there are other surprisingly strong showings as well: Montreal’s Concordia University and Florida State University. Here’s how Scribner’s informal “rankings” compare to those of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Writing Programs, a survey from 1997.

U.S. News and World Report
University of Iowa (4.5 score, out of 5 possible)

Johns Hopkins University (4.2)

University of Houston (4.2)

Columbia University (4.1)

University of Virginia (4.1)

Scribner’s
University of Michigan (4 writers)

Florida State University (3 writers)

Columbia University (3 writers)

Concordia University (3 writers)

Pennsylvania State U. (3 writers)

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Michael Cunningham, whose third novel “The Hours” won the PEN/Faulkner award last week, also won the Pulitzer Prize today in the fiction catagory. Margaret Edson, a kindergarten teacher, took the drama award for her cancer-related drama “Wit.” A. Scott Berg’s “Lindbergh” received the history prize, and former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand received the prize for his “Blizzard of One.”

John McPhee, who like Cunningham is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, won in the general non-fiction category for “Annals of the Former World.” Two New York-area history professors, Edwin G. Burrows of Brooklyn College and Mike Wallace of John Jay College, took the history award for “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.”

Things aren’t too rosy these days for Jim McCann of 1-800-FLOWERS and Ballantine, the publisher that bought the CEO’s autobiography for a $1 million advance. McCann’s unfortunately titled “Stop and Sell the Roses: Lessons from Business and Life,” shipped a modest 20,000 copies and wilted on the shelf. As a result, there’s been some recent mudslinging.

An unnamed Ballantine employee complained to Publisher’s Weekly that McCann had foisted both the unfortunate title and the “would-be-winsome” cover photo (of McCann brandishing a bouquet) onto his publisher. In the same article, a Barnes & Noble manager dismissed the memoir as an “ego book.” That genre includes such classics as Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” and “Pour Your Heart into It” by Howard Schultz, the C.E.O. of Starbucks, and it could be described as a self-aggrandizing autobiography by a powerful business figure, someone whose success guarantees the author an unusual amount of leverage in how the book is marketed.

With its revamped design, the Washington Post’s book section has seen a big change, but a bigger one is afoot: Books reporter David Streitfeld is shifting jobs.

The formidable literary sleuth has broken important stories and uncovered some startling frauds during his 12-year tenure. Perhaps his biggest coup came in 1996, when he unmasked Newsweek writer Joe Klein as the author of the Clinton roman ` clef “Primary Colors.”

An antiquarian-book buyer, Streitfeld stumbled upon a listing in a used book catalog for a galley proof of the controversial novel that happened to contain handwritten notes in its margins. Streitfeld bought the book, and on a hunch he sent it off, with a sample of Klein’s writing, to a handwriting analyst. “It was just the one inspired stroke of my life,” Streitfeld wryly told Salon. Another Streitfeld “stroke” took place last August, when he revealed that the judges who selected the Modern Library’s much-discussed list of the 100 best novels of the century had little to do with each book’s final place on the list and were often as surprised by the rankings as the general public.

“Little Green Men,” Christopher Buckleys satirical D.C. roman ` clef, takes aim at crackpots in the nation’s capital. It takes a few below-the-Beltway swipes as well.

The novel follows a George Will-like talking head named John Oliver Banion, who is kidnapped from his golf course by aliens and must then convince a host of Washingtonians of the UFO threat. Among them is the pseudo-defense expert Karl Cuntmore, a “hugely successful writer of technological-thriller novels.” That could be a tag for anyone from Michael Crichton to William Gibson, but this particular writer considers himself a military man about town. “Oh, don’t play soldier with me,” Banion warns him. “The only uniform you ever wore was a Cub Scout outfit, with a merit badge for pulling the legs off insects.” Could this be “The Hunt for Red October” author Tom Clancy?

Novelist Michael Ondaatje has been criticized — most notably in the Washington Post — for his glorification of Count Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian hero of “The English Patient” and a historical figure who acted as a German operative during World War II. As a fiction writer, Ondaatje can claim creative license. Recently, however, another romantic version of Almasy’s life has been advanced — this time by a historian.