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

Memorial gatherings and the body of Christ(opher)

Mr Steve Wasserman, Christopher Hitchens' literary agent, kindly replied to my query about a possible memorial. Posted with permission.

"In accordance with Christopher’s wishes, his body was donated to medical research. Memorial gatherings will occur next year."