The University of Mississippi Press has just released Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, which is not, as it might seem, a series of interviews but a collection of 30 articles about HST written over the last forty some odd years. The table of contents is impressively eclectic: there’s a Doug Brinkley piece from The Paris Review, a Craig Vetter article from Playboy, and — no joke — a old Ron Rosenbaum story that first ran in High Times. (If you’re wondering: yes, that’s the same Ron Rosenbaum who wrote Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars.) (There are also, predictably a pair of articles titled “Still Gonzo After All These Years.”) (Triple parens alert. The book is also co-edited by someone with one of the all-time great handles: Beef Torrey. I’ve spoken with him, and that’s his honest-to-goodness, god-given name. His parents, I assume, were not vegetarians.)

All of that should more than enough to recommend the book. There is also an essay I wrote back in 2000, when I first met Hunter during a couple of all-night editing sessions at his ranch in Owl Creek. I hadn’t read the piece, titled “Fear and Writing,” in a good five or so years, and it made me both sad and proud: I miss that old fuck, and the piece is actually pretty good. And since it ran in the now-defunct Brill’s Content, this the only place you’ll ever get to read it.