Around 700 BC Hesiod wrote: “Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of. No gossip ever dies away entirely if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.” Divinity? I suppose so: if it cannot be expunged and lives on and on, it earns the title of divinity.

Since Hesiod, numerous works of fiction and nonfiction have been written in part or in toto about gossip. Now comes a short but sweet—sorry, tart—tome by that witty critic, perspicacious polemist, and well-read author Joseph Epstein, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit.¹ Epstein fills his book with anecdotes and biographies, historical and sociological data, droll speculations and saucy comments, and many personal experiences to form a compendious conspectus of this—what shall I call it?—ubiquitous phenomenon or common pursuit called gossip.

Since Hesiod, numerous works of fiction and nonfiction have been written in part or in toto about gossip.

Epstein has published several book-length essays entitled Friendship, Envy, Snobbery, and Ambition, to which he now adds another, particularly suited to his innate curiosity, copious reading, industrious research, and mischievous pen. Oh, and love of gossip, whose practitioner as well as chronicler he mock-apologetically admits to being. This entertaining book is ultimately a chrestomathy of some of the choicest gossip, a florilegium of the rankest and randiest flowers of odoriferous naughtiness.

Epstein’s basic working definition of gossip is “one party telling another