Maria Guarnaschelli at Norton has made a couple of buys outside her usual cookbook field: a two-book deal (mid-six-figure, world rights, with agent Gerry McCauley) for Yale history professor John Mack Faragher. The first book will focus on the expulsion of the Acadians from Canada in the 18th century. Her other two-book deal, also world rights, was with Georges Borchardt, for In the City by Colette Brooks, described as a highly original look at contemporary urban life, plus another untitled work.... Crown's Pete Fornatale bought a book by Kip Stratton of Texas Monthly on the perennial rivalry, in football and all things, between the University of Texas and Texas A&M; it's called Backyard Brawl, it was bought from David McCormick at IMG Literary, and will be published in time for the start of the 2002 football season.... Scholastic's Arthur Levine won an auction for a YA book that has been a big hit in author Garry Disher's native Australia; it is The Divine Wind, about a romance between the son of a pearl merchant in remote north Australia during WWII and the daughter of a Japanese pearl fisherman; Levine bought North American rights from Catherine Drayton at Arthur Pine Associates and will publish as a lead title next spring.