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A final memoir by the late Christopher Hitchens will be out early next year, likely a collection of essays called Mortality. Based on many of his columns for Vanity Fair, the memoir will be released by Atlantic Books, which published his bestselling God Is Not Great, Hitch-22, and Arguably. Hitchens died late Thursday night after battling esophageal cancer. "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," Hitchens wrote recently in his final Vanity Fair column. "However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings.” He went on to dispense with familiar principles and maxims, including “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—a defiant and courageous takedown, to the end.