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From Stephen Elliott
Plenty of people, from Christopher Hitchens to Adam Carolla, have made the assertion that women aren’t funny.
You can probably guess that we at the Rumpus disagree, since we have a whole feature devoted to Funny Women (plus we live in the real world, rather than Misogynist Fantasyland, where women have never, ever rejected Christopher Hitchens or Adam Carolla, and always laugh at their jokes).
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An amorphous aura resonates around authors we discover on our own. Before we hear of their fame and talent, before everyone recommends their book as a “must read” we find their book, lost, broken, beat up in a pile of forgotten paperbacks at some random flea market.
...more“At a luncheon earlier in the day with Hitchens and Berlinski, Taunton asked Hitchens about his health problems. ‘Well, I’m dying, since you asked,’ Hitchens replied. ‘So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail.’”
Despite recently undergoing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, Hitchens still shows up to debate a believer.
...moreTony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series of personal essays he wrote for the New York Review Of Books this year.
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Porn, Christopher Hitchens, snacking on weaker humans … You name it, Rumpus Books has got it. Our weekly roundup below the fold.
The author of the forthcoming My Life with the Lincolns asks what happens when you type Abraham Lincoln into Etsy. The answer is pretty awesome.
Anyone interested in fiction and the Internet should read this now.
...moreA long time ago, back when I was basking in over-priced Leftism in Santa Cruz, I gave a gift to my friend: Letters To A Yong Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens.
At that time Hitchens was a venom-tongued writer for the progressive magazine The Nation and was still pals with the other equally acid-tongued provocateur, Alexander Cockburn. (Who believes, among other things, that Al Gore should be tried for war crimes.)
It was before Hitchens’s infamous transformation into a weird neo-con misanthrope radical, back before he all but officially announced his drunken disdain for women, liberals and Muslims.
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Rarely have I seen a Christopher Hitchens TV interview in which the atheistic author of God is Not Great isn’t knocking back an ice-clinking glass of whiskey of some brand or another. Yet, I never knew Hitch’s hootch of choice was Johnny Walker Black Label until I read a first-person account posted on the brainstorms blog of an evening spent with the God-searing, well-oiled polemicist.
“Frank and April Wheeler are the reverse of the unhappy family in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. They have already tasted the fruits and sweets of the big city, and qualified as urban—perhaps better say urbane—sophisticates. But you know how it is.
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Hitchens’ new memoir