Author and journalist Alan Littell has worked as a merchant mariner and as a newspaper reporter and editor in Boston and Paris. Best known as a nationally distributed travel writer—his credits include The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and Travel & Leisure Magazine—he is author of a novel of the sea, “Courage,” published in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. Littell’s latest book, “Winter Passage,” is a selection of his essays, memoirs and travel articles written over the past 60 years for newspapers and magazines in this country and overseas. Sofka Zinovieff, author of “Putney,” had this to say of the new book: “A wonderful lifetime of world travel is collected in this series of vividly personal yet clear-eyed articles.” Pamela Petro, author of “Travels in an Old Tongue,” praised “Winter Passage” as “the work of a writer as much at home on the slush-covered foredeck of a working ship as he is savoring Chateau d’Yquem 1945.” And Gail Hosking, author of the memoir “Snake’s Daughter,” called Littell’s book “a beautiful collection of musings and reflections from a writer of considerable passion for the world at large.”