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