Short Takes

Jennifer Enderlin at St. Martin's Press has signed another two media thrillers by CBS News producer Mary Jane Clark, for a high six figures, world English, from agent Laura Dail. The next book, Nobody Knows,will follow the last under her present contract, Close to You, due this fall.... Two new agents have joined Jane Dystel Literary Management: Nancy Stender, who has been a buyer at Borders and was most recently at Sanford Greenburger; and Jonas Paterno, a former lawyer whose first agenting job this is.... A book that examines how Aristotle's principles in his Poetics can be applied to screenwriting was sold, world rights, to editor Alison Lowenstein at Hyperion. Provisionally entitled Aristotle Goes to the Movies, it's by Michael Tierno, a story analyst for Miramax, and the sale was made by Florida agent Susan Crawford .... A new biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb project in WWII, has been signed by Doubleday editor-in-chief Bill Thomas. It will be written by Ray Monk, noted English biographer of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, and was sold, U.S. and Canadian only, by Sloan Harris at ICM.... Charlotte Mendelson at Headline in London has bought U.K. and Commonwealth rights to the new book by Susan Vreeland (author of the bestselling Girl in Hyacinth Blue); it's The Passion of Artemesia, a novel based on the life of the great woman painter of the Italian renaissance, which Penguin is doing here in the fall.