王光美 (Wang Guangmei) Muhammad Ali. The MY HERO Project. The 'Aura of Life' After Death, and Other Famous Takes on Mortality - Emily Temple. Twenty impressions of when living stops; from Faulkner, Proust, and other great minds Yesterday marked the publication of Mortality, Christopher Hitchens' posthumous work about his experiences with the cancer that killed him.
We've lost a lot of great minds recently -- Nora Ephron, Maurice Sendak, David Rakoff, and Hitch himself -- and we think this end-of-life memoir in essays, full of Hitchens' trademark wit and his clear-eyed dissection of life as he sees it, may just heal us a little bit, as books tend to do. To celebrate the book's publication, and to help recalibrate our own perspectives on the loss of so many of our intellectual heroes, we've put together this selection of passages on death and mortality from a few of our favorite authors.
George Orwell. Noam Chomsky. Bob Dylan. Beatrice Webb. Helen Keller.