And Yet...

Essays

Christopher Hitchens

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476772080
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The seminal, uncollected essays—lauded as “dazzling” (The New York Times Book Review)—by the late Christopher Hitchens, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller God Is Not Great, showcase the notorious contrarian’s genius for rhetoric and his sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.

For more than forty years, Christopher Hitchens delivered essays to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic that were astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative. His death in December 2011 from esophageal cancer prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary voices—writers, readers, pundits and critics the world over mourned his loss.

At the time of his death, Hitchens left nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form. “Another great book of essays from a writer who we wish were still alive to produce more copy” (National Review), And Yet… ranges from the literary to the political and is a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking “makeover.” The range and quality of Hitchens’s essays transcend the particular occasions for which they were originally written, yielding “a bounty of famous scalps, thunder-blasted targets, and a few love letters from the notorious provocateur-in-chief’s erudite and scathing assessments of American culture” (Vanity Fair). Often prescient, always pugnacious, formidably learned, Hitchens was a polemicist for the ages. With this posthumous volume, he remains, “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist” (The Village Voice).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That
• Orwell’s List
• Orhan Pamuk: Mind the Gap
• Bring on the Mud
• Ohio’s Odd Numbers
• On Becoming American
• Mikhail Lermontov: A Doomed Young Man
• Salman Rushdie: Hobbes in the Himalayas
• My Red-State Odyssey
• The Turkey Has Landed
• Bah, Humbug
• A. N. Wilson: Downhill All the Way
• Ian Fleming: Bottoms Up
• Power Suits
• Blood for No Oil!
• How Uninviting
• Look Who’s Cutting and Running Now
• Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview
• Imperial Follies
• Clive James: The Omnivore
• Gertrude Bell: The Woman Who Made Iraq
• Physician, Heal Thyself
• Edmund Wilson: Literary Companion
• On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part I: Of Vice and Men
• On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part II: Vice and Versa
• On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part III: Mission Accomplished
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Price of Freedom
• Arthur Schlesinger: The Courtier
• Paul Scott: Victoria’s Secret
• The Case against Hillary Clinton
• The Tall Tale of Tuzla
• V. S. Naipaul: Cruel and Unusual
• No Regrets
• Barack Obama: Cool Cat
• The Lovely Stones
• Edward M. Kennedy: Redemption Song
• Engaging with Iran Is Like Having Sex with Someone Who Hates You
• Colin Powell: Powell Valediction
• Shut Up about Armenians or We’ll Hurt Them Again
• Hezbollah’s Progress
• The Politicians We Deserve
• Rosa Luxemburg: Red Rosa
• Joan Didion: Blue Nights
• The True Spirit of Christmas
• Charles Dickens’s Inner Child
• G. K. Chesterton: The Reactionary
• The Importance of Being Orwell
• What Is Patriotism?
• About Christopher Hitchens
• Index
• Copyright