Undercover

Julia Gillard's memoir My Story will be published on Wednesday and looks sure to be an instant bestseller. With media interviews that day, the former prime minister begins her publicity tour the following week at a sold-out Dymocks literary lunch in Sydney and five more sold-out Sydney events before appearing around the country at almost 70 events and finishing in Adelaide on Christmas Eve. Karen Reid, head of marketing and publicity at Random House, will only say they have printed "a significant number". With all information embargoed, literary editors will receive review copies on publication day so readers will have to wait a while for assessments that go beyond the instant curiosity of "what did she reveal?".

LEST WE FORGET

In the first interview about his new novel Amnesia (out in October from Hamish Hamilton), Peter Carey told Britain's Bookseller he was asked by his American editor Sonny Mehta if he would like to co-write the memoir of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. "But I thought, no. Two control freaks? It wouldn't work," Carey said. That was a smart response because the writer who took on the challenge in 2011, Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, got tangled in Assange's paranoid battle with Jamie Byng of Canongate, who published a first draft of the memoir despite Assange's desire to cancel the project.

Instead, Carey built a novel on his impression that being Australian was central to Assange's desire to hack into US intelligence because the US had "f---ed Australians over". Assange and Edward Snowden were "in the background" as he wrote Amnesia, a literary thriller that opens with a young Melbourne woman suspected of releasing a virus into US-designed prison security systems and a journalist planning to write her "real story". Amnesia strikes me as a cousin to Carey's 1994 novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, a surreal fable about the strained alliance between a large and a smaller country, and an extension of the colonial theme that runs through his fiction.

FESTIVAL FUNDING

The City of Sydney has approved a modest increase in sponsorship for the Sydney Writers' Festival for the next three years, including $360,000 in cash (up from $358,000 this year) and $110,000 in venue and banner pole hire (up from $109,000), indexed for inflation. Ben Strout, the festival's executive director, is pleased but points out, "In my time [since 2009] we've had a $100,000 increase in our subsidy from the City and our revenue has increased by $1 million through box office, sponsorship, philanthropy and grants". The NSW Government gives $417,000 and private donations have grown 250 per cent since 2012 but ambitious plans for audience development will still stretch the budget.

CATS, DOGS AND OTHER STARS

One day I intend to be in New York for the New Yorker Festival, which features The New Yorker staff and contributors in conversation with creative people. If you're planning to be there on October 10-12 this year, you might still pick up tickets (they went on sale last weekend at newyorker.com/festival). I would love to see Seinfeld creator Larry David with editor David Remnick, artist Ai Weiwei with Evan Osnos, cartoonists Roz Chast and Bob Mankoff together, and the creators of the Broadway musical The Last Ship including Sting, moderated by writer Adam Gopnik. But my guess is one of the most popular events will be You, the Jury: Cats v Dogs, in which Gopnik and film reviewer Anthony Lane lead teams including Malcolm Gladwell and Joyce Carol Oates in a debate about which animal is superior.