One Year On

Richard Dawkins Foundation: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

'Why Evolution Is True' remembers Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens died a year ago today—it seems longer, doesn’t it?—and of course nobody has emerged to fill the vast lacuna he left. His rhetorical skills were unmatchable. Read more

So does the Paleolibrarian: "..Thank you Hitch for having balls to challenge ignorance and stand your ground." Read more

And Salman Rushdie: Christopher Hitchens died a year ago today. I still think of him every day.

Carol Blue answers questions

Carol Blue, the widow of author Christopher Hitchens, answered viewer questions submitted via Twitter, Facebook.

Watch it here (c-spanvideo.org)

Authors on Christopher Hitchens

Martin Amis, Carol Blue, Cary Goldstein, and Robert Weil discussed Christopher Hitchens' book Mortality. This event took place at the 2012 Miami Book Fair International held November 11-18, 2012 on the campus of Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida.

Watch it here (c-spanvideo.org)

Piers Morgan interviews Carol Blue

Tom Cook has a thread on reddit where you can remember Hitchens, and what he meant to you.

It's time to give Christopher Hitchens a statue

By James Bloodworth

During his lifetime many of the late Christopher Hitchens’s most vociferous critics were former allies from the political left. How, it was asked, could a once radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neo-conservative project to remake the world?

Read more (independent.co.uk)

Bill Donohue Debates Christopher Hitchens: Part 1

   

Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7aiBbA8_Fg
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29HxzgqlWrM

Labour politician threatens to quit if bust to ‘pro-war’ journalist Christopher Hitchens goes up in Red Lion Square

LABOUR councillors are blocking plans to honour campaigning journalist Christopher Hitchens with a statue, with one of them branding the late writer as a “pro-war Islamophobe”. A trail of emails leaked to the New Journal show a sharp exchange between the British Humanist Association (BHA), which wants the statue to be erected in Red Lion Square, Holborn, and politicians representing the ward.

Read more
http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2012/oct/labour-politician-threatens-quit-if-bust-%E2%80%98pro-war%E2%80%99-journalist-christopher-hitchens-goe

Hitchens' last days

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
"Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' widow, talks candidly about her husband's dying days."

Watch here (abc.net.au)

Graydon Carter & Carol Blue on Christopher Hitchens

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, & Carol Blue, widow of Christopher Hitchens, on “Mortality” a series of essays Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair while undergoing treatment for cancer. 

Watch it here (charlierose.com)

An afterword to the life of Christopher Hitchens

Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' widow, talks about his legacy, his illness and life without him.

Listen here. (abc.net.au)

What Sort of People are the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club?

By Peter Hitchens

I can’t really claim that I never notice the extraordinarily spiteful attacks on me which come from one particular quarter. They're almost impossible to miss. Some of them are on Twitter. Others arrive here directly. Others surface in various places on the Internet. Those responsible claim to be admirers of my late brother, Christopher.

Read more (hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk)

Carol Blue on Q

The iconoclast Christopher Hitchens loved life and delighted in "doing and thinking and writing all the things that he had always done, up until the very end," says his widow, Carol Blue.
Listen here (cbc.ca)

and

This year’s LENNONONO GRANT FOR PEACE recipients are:

RACHEL CORRIE, JOHN PERKINS, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, PUSSY RIOT plus one more

http://imaginepeace.com/archives/18529

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/20/christopher-hitchens-pussy-riot-peace-prize-john-lennon_n_1899208.html

Carol Blue On Mourning And 'Mortality'

Talk of the Nation.
Carol Blue, Hitchens' wife of 20 years, interviewed on NPR by Neal Conan.

Listen here. (30 min.)

An interview with Carol Blue

Amazon: Mortality shows us a different side of Christopher Hitchens. How was he different in private from the public persona that so many of us saw?

There was a gentle side of Christopher that wasn’t necessarily on display in his public appearances. If you were to watch every YouTube video of Christopher speaking and debating, it wouldn’t convey what he was like in private...

Read more http://www.omnivoracious.com/2012/09/on-mortality-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens-widow-carol-blue.html

Carol Blue on The Leonard Lopate Show

Carol Blue, the widow of Christopher Hitchens, discusses his last book, Mortality, a collection of his series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, written over the last year of his life.



http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2012/sep/07/christopher-hitchens-mortality/

Carol Blue on "CBS This Morning"

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57508197/christopher-hitchens-widow-on-his-death-god-never-came-up/

Mortality reviews 3

The Wall Street Journal
A Wit Rages Before the Abyss
By Henry Allen

The proof that there is no afterlife is that Christopher Hitchens is not sending us columns, essays, books, perversities, aperçus and polemics from it. The closest we have so far is the 104 pages of "Mortality." He wrote them while knowing that he would die soon of esophageal cancer, which he did last Dec. 15, at the age of 62. Not a word from him since. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577605110400199868.html

The Guardian
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens – review
By Colm Tóibín

He was the best company in the whole world; he had read widely and because he was an industrious man and filled with curiosity, he hoped to read much more. He would stay up late drinking and talking, moving with judicious and delicious care from the large questions of the day to the small sweet business of invective, anecdotes and gossip.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/mortality-christopher-hitchens-review

The New York Times/Sunday Book Review
Staying power
By Christopher Buckley

Christopher Hitchens began his memoir, “Hitch-22,” on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He wrote, “So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/review/mortality-by-christopher-hitchens.html

Big Think
Book Of The Month
By Nick Clairmont

We are pleased but saddened to introduce our third book of the month: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. The posthumous book represents the last work of the great journalist, polemicist, and thinker.      http://bigthink.com/book-of-the-month/book-of-the-month-mortality-by-christopher-hitchens

BOOKFORUM
The Last Word
By Jeff Sharlet

Mortality, a posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens’s short essays on living with terminal esophageal cancer—“a distinctly bizarre way of ‘living,’” he emphasizes, “lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon”—is an odd little book, neither fully a cancer memoir nor a meditation on the meanings we attribute to the disease.
http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_03/10034

Book Review Podcast: Mortality

Arts Beat/The New York Times
By John Williams

This week in the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Buckley reviews “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens, a slender book that collects the essays Mr. Hitchens wrote after being stricken with esophageal cancer.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/book-review-podcast-christopher-hitchenss-mortality/

Mortality reviews 2

Mail Online
By John Preston

The Christopher Hitchens who stares out of the cover of this book is a very different-looking figure to the one who appeared on all his other books. He’s thinner for a start - much thinner. And so is his hair. The once-thick brown mop has gone and in its place is a light dusting of frizz Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2195770/MORTALITY-BY-CHRISTOPHER-HITCHENS.html#ixzz257VGbDFf

Los Angeles Times
Review: Christopher Hitchens stays contrarian in 'Mortality'
By David L. Ulin

For all that literature is an art of self-exposure, writers tend to back away from impending death. The shelf of firsthand looks at what Janet Hobhouse called "this dying business" is a short one — http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-christopher-hitchens-20120902,0,6090416.story

The Miami Herald
Hitch’s losing battle
By Ariel Gonzalez

 By all means, let us speak ill of the dead. Christopher Hitchens would have it no other way. He wore out soles from dancing on graves. Among the famously departed he dissed were Princess Diana (“a simpering Bambi narcissist”), Mother Teresa (“a thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf”), and Ronald Reagan (“an obvious phony and loon”).
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/31/2976306/hitchs-losing-battle.html#storylink=cpy

The Huffington Post
The Imperfect Pleasure of Reading Christopher Hitchens
By Wayne K. Spear

The author known chiefly from his 1949 work Nineteen Eighty-Four was by turns a police officer, tramp, gardener and soldier, as well as a broadcaster -- his depiction of the Ministry of Truth drawing upon the BBC building in which he broadcast a literary radio program.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/wayne-k-spear/christopher-hitchens_b_1836656.html

Plus Excerpt via Publishers Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53774-excerpt--mortality-by-christopher-hitchens.html

Death, Explained

Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality: A rare honest book about death.
By Katie Roiphe

Before being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22, “I want to stare death in the eye.”

This seems, of course, an impossible blustery task, but in his last book, Mortality he comes astonishingly close to pulling it off.


Read more http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/roiphe/2012/08/christopher_hitchens_mortality_an_honest_book_about_death_.html

The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay

2012 Winner: Arguably

"Arguably is a book of essays astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative, taking on everything from Middle Eastern politics to Thomas Jefferson and Prince Charles, from Lolita and Ezra Pound to Hitler, Saul Bellow and Hugo Boss."

Read more http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/2240

Martin Amis: Still talking to Hitch

1977

Slate
Author Martin Amis on coping with the loss of his best friend Christopher Hitchens.

When Christopher Hitchens died in December, Martin Amis lost his best friend. The British author says his immediate desolation gave way to a much greater love of life, something Amis believes Hitchens had in spades and bequeathed to him when he passed away.

Watch video here.

Mortality reviews

The Guardian

In these final essays, Hitchens examines his own disbelief that writing – indistinguishable to him from living – is about to end. "Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Centre rise again? To read – if not indeed to write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/26/mortality-christopher-hitchens-review

Daily Mail Online

There has been a recent spate of books written by men suffering from terminal cancer. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is, by my reckoning, the third this year, the others being When I Die by the New Labour PR Philip Gould, and Until Further Notice, I Am Alive by the art critic Tom Lubbock.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2193609/MORTALITY-Christopher-Hitchens-Review-new-book-written-great-debater.html#ixzz24f8isF2G

WHITE WALLS / BLACK INK

No one who might have glanced over back in December at a post on my now defunct political blog, Orwell’s Hanky, about the death of Christopher Hitchens, will labor through this review with any misapprehensions regarding objectivity. I’ve grown to become very comfortable in the position that no review (or even, honestly, rather much journalism of any sort) can or should reach for objectivity. http://wwbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/christopher-hitchenss-mortality/

Mortality

Amazon Book Description:

MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/

Christopher Hitchens: an impossible act to follow

The Telegraph
By Carol Blue

Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow. If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’s assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time”, but you will know what I mean – or at least you won’t think, “She would say that, she’s his wife.” Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.

Read more http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9480797/Christopher-Hitchens-an-impossible-act-to-follow.html

The “unpublished jottings” of Christopher Hitchens

By Christopher Hitchens and David Plotz

"Remember, you too are mortal"—hit me at the top of my form and just as things were beginning to plateau. My two assets my pen and my voice—and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I'd been "straying into the arena of the unwell" and now "a vulgar little tumor" was evident. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/fighting_words/2012/08/christopher_hitchens_mortality_the_unpublished_jottings_of_the_late_great_writer_and_thinker_.html

'I am not fighting or battling cancer - it is fighting me'

Daily Mail Online

As he faced death from cancer, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens kept his wry sense of humour to the very end, it emerged today.
He used a hospital food tray as a desk for his computer to record his last thoughts about the illness which claimed his life at 62.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190200/I-fighting-battling-cancer--fighting-Last-words-author-Christopher-Hitchens-faced-death.html

Mr. Deity and the Hitch

The Importance of Being Orwell

Vanity Fair | August 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

George Orwell’s best-known work (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) emerged from painstaking investigation. In the introduction to a groundbreaking volume of Orwell’s diaries, V.F.’s late columnist dissects one of the 20th century’s greatest political minds, a writer who was also his lifelong inspiration. 

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/08/christopher-hitchens-george-orwell

MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens

By Cary Goldstein, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Twelve Books

This September, Twelve will publish the last original book-length work by Christopher Hitchens, an intimate and brave chronicle of his ordeal with esophageal cancer.

 

MORTALITY will be published on September 4, and will include a Foreword by Christopher’s longtime editor and chum, Graydon Carter, and a powerful and beautifully rendered Afterword by his wife, Carol Blue. We will be sure to update our blog and website with evolving plans for publication and media.

http://twelvebooks.com/mortality-by-christopher-hitchens-2/

Missing Hitchens

Vanity Fair Slideshow July 2012

Family, friends, and esteemed colleagues gathered to celebrate the life and career of award-winning journalist Christopher Hitchens at the Cooper Union Foundation Building, in New York City.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/christopher-hitchens-memorial-photos#slide=1

Lawrence Krauss - Christopher Hitchens Tribute

Richard Dawkins - Christopher Hitchens Tribute

Hitchens honoured with Orwell memorial

The Telegraph
Christopher Hitchens, the writer and commentator once described as the heir to George Orwell, was given a posthumous honour at this year's Orwell Prize.

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and commentator who died last year, was last night honoured with a Memorial at this year's Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing.

More http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9287302/Christopher-Hitchens-honoured-with-Orwell-memorial.html

VF & CH Win National Magazine Award in “Columns and Commentary”

Vanity Fair

Fair won a 2012 National Magazine Award at a ceremony held by the American Society of Magazine Editors last night, in recognition of the late author Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant columns and commentary. Hitchens’s three essays—“When the King Saved God,” “Unspoken Truths,” and “From Abbattabad to Worse”—touched on the topics of politics, religion, and dealing with the diminishing effects of chemotherapy. 

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/05/vanity-fair-christopher-hitchens-win-2012-national-magazine-award

Related
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Magazines_22/New-York-leads-National-Magazine-Awards.asp 

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/time_new_york_and_new_yorker_stampede_b74Wuty3HfOfwtl5Ej3MZP 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/national-magazine-awards-christopher-hitchens-honored-posthumous-ellie-121746582.html

PEN Festival Panel Gives Hitchens Mixed Grades

Arts Beat / New York Times

The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature kicked off Monday night with a panel discussion about the life and work of Christopher Hitchens. Billed as a “tribute” to the writer, the promotional materials for the event said it would engage with this question, among others: “Did the man and his methods overshadow his ideas?”

Read more http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/pen-festival-panel-gives-christopher-hitchens-mixed-grades/

Christopher Hitchens Memorial

By Vanity Fair

In part one of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, Graydon Carter welcomed attendees and speakers James Fenton, Lawrence Krauss, Edwin Blue, Patrick Cockburn, Max McGuinness, Aimée Bell, Michael Zilkha, Victor Navasky, and Tom Stoppard. 

UPDATE: More parts added. Watch the videos here.

Christopher Hitchens’s Memorial

By Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens’s Memorial: Sean Penn, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Others Pay Tribute

 “To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in his June 2011 column, “Unspoken Truths,” for Vanity Fair. Today, at a memorial service in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, in New York, many of Hitchens’s friends and admirers did just that.
Read more
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/04/christopher-hitchens-memorial-vanity-fair

Related links

Christopher Hitchens' wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/20/christopher-hitchens-memorial-new-york

Christopher Hitchens Memorial: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Olivia Wilde Remember Writer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/christopher-hitchens-memorial_n_1441508.html?ref=new-york&ir=New%20York

Christopher Hitchens Is Memorialized With an Irreverence That Would Please Him http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/20/christopher-hitchens-is-memorialized-with-an-irreverance-that-would-please-him.html

Christopher Hitchens remembered at memorial service in NYC http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/christopher-hitchens-remembered-at-memorial-service-in-nyc/2012/04/20/gIQA1usIWT_blog.html

Hitch remembered with wit http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/hitch_remembered_with_wit_6q4Tmuvhb8rZsSZRPqEggL?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Page%20Six

REMEMBERING CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/remembering-christopher-hitchens.html

Vanity Fair to Host Christopher Hitchens Memorial

Vanity Fair will host a memorial for the late Christopher Hitchens this Friday, April 20, at noon in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. Scheduled to pay tribute in New York are Stephen Fry, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Christopher Buckley, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/04/christopher-hitchens-memorial-april-20-vanity-fair

Read also "A Memorial, Ribald and Reverent, for Christopher Hitchens" http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/a-memorial-both-ribald-and-reverent-for-christopher-hitchens/

A discussion about Christopher Hitchens

A discussion about the life and work of author Christopher Hitchens with his friends and fellow authors: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, James Fenton & Ian McEwan.

Watch it here (charlierose.com)

Birthday, Memorial and a Tribute

It's April 13th. Some want to call it Christopher Hitchens Day. I agree with Staks Rosch: "While some atheists will be raising a glass of Johnny Walk Black in his honor, I think the time for that solute is over. Now is the time to share his wit and wisdom with others in celebration of his life. So pick up your copy of God Is Not Great or your Quotable Hitchens and share a quote or three on your social networks and with your friends and family on his birthday. Read more (examiner.com)
Then again, why not do both?

There's also a Hitch day facebook event http://www.facebook.com/events/328324723893296/

Ephraim Hardcastle asks "What would Christoper Hitchens make of his Vanity Fair memorial arrangements?" It's an invitation-only event at Cooper Union school in New York, on April 20.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129092/What-Christoper-Hitchens-make-Vanity-Fair-memorial-arrangements.html#ixzz1rtRRmk94

Then we have the PEN World Voices Festival, New York City, with a Christopher Hitchens tribute on Monday, April 30.
With Graydon Carter, Victor S. Navasky, George Packer, and Katha Pollit. Moderated by Ian Buruma.
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/6380/prmID/2206

No word yet on a possible London, UK memorial.

The Orwell Prize longlist

The Telegraph
The late Christopher Hitchens is one of 18 authors selected for the Orwell Prize for political writing.

A book by the late Christopher Hitchens is leading the field for this year’s Orwell Prize for best political book. Arguably, a collection of essays whose subjects range from the War on Terror to Diana, Princess of Wales, was praised by Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph as displaying the author's characteristic “wit, intelligence and passion”.

This year's shortlists are announced next month and the winners on May 23.

Read more (telegraph.co.uk

The Hitch-Files

GAWKER
The FBI Monitored a Young Christopher Hitchens

The FBI has released some of its files on the late Christopher Hitchens, including records indicating that he was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation in the 1980s. 

Read more 
http://gawker.com/5891643/the-fbi-monitored-a-young-christopher-hitchens
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/180018/the-fbi-spied-on-christopher-hitchens-because-of-his-political-ideology/

3 books by Hitchens to be reissued in April

USA TODAY

Cary Goldstein, publisher and editor-in-chief of Twelve, says the three books being reissued in print and as e-books for the first time, are:

- The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice with a new introduction by Thomas Mallon, originally published in 1995.
- No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton with a new introduction by Douglas Brinkley, originally published in 1999.
- The Trial of Henry Kissinger, with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman, originally published in 2001.

Read more (books.usatoday.com)

Oscars 2012: Christopher Hitchens honored by Vanity Fair

LA Times / Ministry of Gossip

Writer Christopher Hitchens, who died in December, will get a fitting tribute from Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor, at the magazine's star-studded Oscars party.
Read more http://lat.ms/waQatW

Each place setting at the party has an engraved Zippo lighter with a Christopher Hitchens quote..
https://twitter.com/#!/VanityFair/status/173948927542968320/photo/1

The Reactionary

Atlantic Magazine | March 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

PROFESSOR KER’S SPIRITED and double-barreled attempt at a rehabilitation of his cherished subject is enjoyable in its own right, and takes in such matters as Chesterton’s dialectical genius for paradox, the authority of the Father Brown stories in the detective genre, and the salience of Charles Dickens in the English canonical one. But for him to show that his hero was the protagonist of a superior form of English democratic virtue, Ker would have to meet me where we are at agreement: on the high quality of Chesterton’s poems.

Read more (theatlantic.com)

The story behind Christopher Hitchens’s March 2012 essay here.
By Benjamin Schwarch, The Atlantic’s literary and national editor.

In Defense of Richard Dawkins

FREE INQUIRY February / March 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

If you haven’t read it, you will almost certainly have seen it: the critique of Professor Richard Dawkins that arraigns him for being too “strident” in his confrontations with his critics. According to this line of attack, Dawkins has no business stepping outside the academy to become a “public intellectual” and even...

Read more (secularhumanism.org)

Arrangements and petitions

Funeral and Memorial arrangements
By Peter Hitchens
Some people have asked me when and where my brother’s funeral took place. In fact, as Christopher donated his body to medical science, there has not been and will not be any funeral. He took this decision partly because of his religious (or rather non-religious) opinions, and partly because, much influenced by his friend Jessica Mitford and her book ‘The American Way of Death’, he disliked what he regarded as the excesses of the American funeral industry.
Read more (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk)

and..


Hitchens Monument Petition
Please help get a statue of Christopher erected in London (and, after so many comments rightly suggesting it, we’ll try for DC too) by signing the e-petition. Sign it here (atheist-reference.org)

Take it seriously or not, there is a 'Award a posthumous Knighthood to Christopher Hitchens' petition with 273 signatures here. (ipetitions.com)

Hitchens memoir delayed to September

Publication of Christopher Hitchens' last book Mortality, originally scheduled for April, has been put back to the autumn.

The title, a collection of essays on death first published in Vanity Fair, will now appear in September.

Read more (thebookseller.com)

Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, Feb 2012)

By Salman Rushdie

On June 8th, 2010, I was “in conversation” with Christopher Hitchens at the 92nd Street Y in New York in front of his customary sellout audience, to launch his memoir, Hitch-22. Christopher turned in a bravura performance that night, never sharper, never funnier, and afterwards at a small, celebratory dinner the brilliance continued. A few days later he told me that it was on the morning of the Y event that he had been given the news about his cancer.

Read more http://bit.ly/yYScFt

A Jigger to Hitchens and a Toast to the Man

Vanity Fair February 2012
By Graydon Carter

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died 10 days before Christmas at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. His was a true life of the mind, and, in this respect, he towered over his contemporaries in Washington, New York, and London.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2012/02/graydon-201201

Charles Dickens’s Inner Child

Vanity Fair February 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

Those who study Charles Dickens, or who keep up the great cult of his admiration, had been leading a fairly quiet life until a few years ago. The occasional letter bobs to the surface, or a bit of reminiscence is discovered, or perhaps some fragment of a souvenir from his first or second American tour.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/hitchens-201202