In Philip Roths intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writers highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera and Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi and Auschwitz, Edna OBrien and Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld and Bukovina, Ivan Klma and Prague, Isaac Singer and Warsaw, Bruno Schulz and Poland what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer and the provocative time and place? Roths questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, and he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society. Also included here are appreciative portraits of two of Roths late friends, each transfixed till the end by his artistic vocation the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston as well as several cartoons drawn by Guston, a gift to Roth to illustrate his novella THE BREAST and printed here for the first time. SHOP TALK concludes with Roths essay Rereading Saul Bellow, a vivid presentation of Bellows achievement and, in the spirit of this collection, very much a colleagues reading.