The book was edited by his widow, Gloria Hochman, who says she went through 7,000 of Stan's columns and whittled it down to 100.
"That I think are very typical of what readers will want to hear, want to read, want to remember," she said of the columns.
Those columns make up the book "Stan Hochman Unfiltered: 50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter," an emotional project she says took two years.
"It was bittersweet. It was. I smiled, I cried, I laughed, I had sleepless nights. The book brought me close to him, but on the other hand it made me very aware that he's not here and he's not coming back. It took me a long time to come to terms with that. Now that the book is written, what I do is keep re-reading it. Every night, I read another chapter or two. I feel closer to him when I'm doing that and then I close the book and it's like I've turned the page and I have to remember, he's not going to be writing like this anymore. And that is very sad for me," she said.
"He wrote about Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali about the fight they had, the fight of the century, I think it was in 1971. Joe Frazier won that fight, but he came out of it with a face full of lumps and bumps and scratches and blood oozing out of his chin and Stan wrote a terrific column about that," she said.
The two were married for 54 years.