Final Hitchens Book to Hit Shelves Next Year

For fans of Christopher Hitchens, one final book. A memoir entitled Mortality will be released in early 2012; it's based on a series of articles the journalist wrote for Vanity Fair describing his battle with esophageal cancer, reports the Guardian. A spokesman noted that the book had been in the works for some time. Hitchens asserted in his final column for Vanity Fair, "Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to 'do' death in the active and not the passive sense." (More Christopher Hitchens stories.)