During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported ‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.’ Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing his voice. Mortality is the most meditative piece of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.
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Published by Penguin.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) – Chilean author Isabel Allende has won a Danish literature prize for her “magical and spellbinding storytelling.”
The 500,000 kroner ($86,000) Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize is given to a writer whose works compare with those of the legendary Andersen, who was born in 1805 and wrote about 160 fairytales and poems before his death in 1875.
More than 57 million copies of Allende’s books, which incorporate elements of magic and fantasy, have been sold worldwide, most notably “The House of the Spirits,” which catapulted her to fame when it was published in 1982.
Prize organizers praised Allende’s “mixture of various ages, cultures, forms of knowledge and myths” that have given her storytelling “wingspan and height.”
Previous award recipients include Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho and “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling.
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