Columbia M.F.A. grad Heidi Julavits has plenty to celebrate: she just had a short story in Esquire and, on her 30th birthday last week, her agent, Henry Dunow, accepted a rumored $500,000 world-rights, two-book preempt from Putnam executive editor Faith Sale. The first book will be The Mineral Palace, a Depression-era story of a Colorado woman accused of infanticide. Dunow, who submitted the first 85 pages of the manuscript in his shopping of Julavits's work to publishers, described the tale as a "corruption of the Medea myth."