Bob Pack ’51, the Abernethy Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Emeritus at Middlebury College, takes a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life in his 18th and latest collection of poems, Laughter Before Sleep (University of Chicago Press).

Essayist and lawyer Robert Grossman ’56 mixes history with courtroom drama in a story of a Jewish naval officer handling court-martial cases at the U.S. base in Morocco in his first novel Another Time/Another Land: A Fictional Memoir (Xlibris).

Richard Dellamora ’66, a visiting professor at UCLA’s department of English, offers the first full look at the entire range of published and unpublished works of fiction, poetry and autobiography by a controversial author in Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Jon Lawrence ’66, a retired University of California, Irvine physics professor, uncovers the grim realties of the 19th-century American West and offers a range of perspectives through interviews with nine prominent scholars as coauthor of Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres (University of Oklahoma Press).

Native New Englander Sara Hoagland Hunter ’76 intertwines Christmas magic and coastal lighthouses in her story about a girl named Kate who refuses to let an approaching storm harm her family’s holiday in the Great Point Lighthouse on Nantucket Island in The Lighthouse Santa (University Press of New England).

Antique scrapbook collector and former Harvard library archivist Caroline Preston ’75 offers a visual trip back to the flapper age of the 1920s with her fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Laura Gordon Kutnick ’75 contributes a chapter, “The Death of Stieg Larsson: Mysteries Within the Mysteries,” to a collection of interviews regarding the stories behind the author and his popular trilogy in The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of Our Time (St. Martin’s Griffin).

Kathy Stoughton ’83 collaborates with a New Hampshire first-grade teacher to provide fundamental machine concepts with Simple Machines Make Work Easier and a related workbook with six experiments, Simple Machines Lab Notebook (CreateSpace).

Jay Kumar ’88 explains everything you need to know about finding choice grouse habitat, setting up a shot, making gun and shell choices, and choosing modern gear in Serious Grouse Hunting, Book 1: Ruffed Grouse, Of Course (Sasquatch Media).

Diane Mutti Burke ’90, an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, examines how American slavery and slaveholding were influenced by the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise in On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (University of Georgia Press).

Award-winning adventure writer and adventurer David Page ’90 explores Yosemite National Park in the second edition of An Explorer’s Guide: Yosemite and the Southern Sierra Nevada (Countryman Press).

David Kaiser ’93, the head of MIT’s program in science, technology and society, looks at how a band of freewheeling psychedelic scientists in the 1970s helped to rejuvenate modern physics in How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W. Norton and Co.).

Daniel Hochman ’11 and Mike Lewis ’11 team up to offer funny, functional phrasebooks—available in French, Spanish or Italian—for young adult travelers with Can We Swim Here (Naked)? (BookCrafters).