Rachel Feder weaves together the sublime and the ordinary, the popular and the abstruse, the Romantic and the anti-Romantic. Really, how are celestial bodies and celebrities alike?

Writing in the voice of a chronicler of shades of old Hollywood (who sounds suspiciously like Hedda Hopper), Daniel Lavery resurrects old phantoms so that the gossip of yesterday overlays the gossip of today like an uncanny wavering in the hot air above a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

Wendy Vogel traces the history of the term “gossip,” reflecting on how its origins have shaped the collective understanding of whisper networks and #MeToo.