The Knopf PR people may be on vacation, but we learned from bibliographers Michael Broomfield and Jack De Bellis’ Knopf contact that Higher Gossip is estimated at 512 pages—roughly the same size as Hugging the Shore—and it’s priced at $40. Christopher Carduff compiled and edited the volume, which is divided into five sections:

“Real Conversation” consists of two previously published personal essays, one previously published humorous piece, three previously published short fictions, and six poems (“The Lovelorn Astronomer,” “Basium XVI,” “Head of a Girl, at the Met,” “Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital,” “An Hour Without Color,” and “Not Cancelled Yet.”

“Book Chat” includes three speeches (“Humor in Fiction,” “The Plight of the American Writer,” and “The Written Word”); tributes to Kierkegaard, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sissman, and Carver; three forewords/afterwords; and 15 book reviews.

“Gallery Tours” features 20 essays on art, and “Pet Topics” contains three previously published essays on science, six musings on Massachusetts (including “Harvard Square in the Fifties,” “Ipswich in the Seventies,” and “Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer”), and five post-Golf Dreams writings on golf.

“Table Talk” is the ephemeral category, including remarks made at book conventions, short musing, forewords, addresses, letters, prefaces, notes, and a humorous piece on “The original ending of Self-Consciousness.“