ma.ttrubinste.in

My new novel, A Little Rain on Thursday, is back from the printers, and it looks fantastic. Chong at Text Publishing has done a great job with the design and it’s tremendous to hold the thing in my hand. It looks almost exactly like a real book!

It will be launched by the hugely talented Delia Falconer at 6:00 for 6:30 pm on Tuesday, 5th June 2007 upstairs at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe, Sydney. You can book a spot here. Naturally, it would be great to see you there.

One of the last things I did in Cambridge was to climb the tower of the St John’s College Chapel. The tower is one of the most preposterous things in town, and is completely out of proportion to the already-kind-of-overblown chapel it stands athwart. It wasn’t always going to be like that:

Scott’s plans for the Chapel included only a small “fleche”, not the 163-feet-high tower that was eventually built. But after work had already begun a former member of the College named Henry Hoare offered £3,000 down and £1,000 a year for five years to finance the building of the tower. The offer was accepted, but despite the urgings of the Bursar the College failed to insure Mr Hoare’s life – he was, after all, a young and healthy man. Two years later he died as a result of a railway accident, leaving the College with a Chapel Tower and a large debt.

You need to be or know a member of the College to get hold of the key, there’s a very dark, tight, winding staircase and the views from the top are fantastic—a rare chance to properly see the geometry of all the colleges’ courts and the lines of the original town. There’s a sign asking people not to carve things in the roof, but you can see the results. And this pair of tags is priceless, kind of sums up the whole place!

This year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival is on in about three weeks and it looks like a cracker. This is being billed as the 10th annual one—it’s older than that but really took off when it moved to Walsh Bay in 1998. I was there that year, a bit out of my depth—but I’m back again this year. It’s a stunning location and a great place to hang around. It does get crowded, even now that it’s spilled into a bunch of other venues around town and beyond—in fact, way beyond—but that’s very encouraging.

I’m looking forward to Andrew O’Hagan, whose Personality is a beautiful study of fame and loneliness; to Richard Ford, whose celebrated The Sportswriter I am determined to read in the next couple of weeks; and to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if I can snarf a ticket from somewhere. Richard Dawkins is kvetching via satellite, and there’s an impressive panel on Writing in an Age of Terror, plus a debate over whether the balance between national security and human rights was “right” in the case of David Hicks—Bret Walker SC and Lex Lasry QC say no, Gerard Henderson says sure, why not? It’s a clash of the titans!

I’m involved in the following events:

Concertos, Gospels and A Little Rain On Thursday
Tuesday, May 29 2007, 11:30 – 12:30
Carrington Hotel, Blue Mountains

Hear some of the best new Australian writing as Jo Gardiner, Emily Maguire and Matt Rubinstein talk with Varuna’s Creative Director Peter Bishop about their new novels and the intimate lives of us.

Books in the Digital Age
Friday, June 1 2007, 17:00 – 18:00
SDC 1

Digital media is the new black, but what does it means for books? Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine. Discussing what the digital age means for books and copyright are Sherman Young, Michael Fraser and Matt Rubinstein.

The 15 fame-filled minutes of the fanzine writer
Sunday, June 3 2007, 12:30 – 13:30
Bangarra Theatre

Now that the Blog Age has advanced the status of fanzine from the work of an individual with access to a photocopier to global proportions and even fame, will we see the rise of a new generation of authors whose work may not ever make it into print? Does it mean better quality writing? Or just more typing? Matt Rubinstein, Rachel Hills and Andrew Mueller discuss.

Literary Mysteries
Sunday, June 3 2007, 15:30 – 16:30
Bangarra Mezzanine

A translator and linguist uncovers a manuscript written in the crypt of an old stone church in Sydney. A priceless exhibition of the papers of poet Emily Dickinson goes missing on arrival in Sydney and a lonely single father starts to follow the newspaper articles about the theft. Matt Rubinstein and Mark Ragg talk about their literary mysteries set on Sydney’s streets.

Come along, it’ll be great!