The saying goes — or at least it did in a cult-famous New Orleans documentary — that " piano players rarely play together. " That goes for novelists, too. But in Philip Roth’s recent collection, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, one really does see novelists writing together. Most of the pieces are identified as " conversations " — with Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edna O’Brien. These aren’t " profiles " or essays but simple Q&As preceded by Roth’s elegant introductions. The remaining pieces in the book vary the format: there’s an " exchange " (of letters) with Mary McCarthy, reminiscences about Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston (with illustrations by Guston for Roth’s The Breast), and a " re-reading " of the work of Saul Bellow.

But those conversations are the heart of the book. In his introductions (the pieces appeared in various publications, from the New York Times Book Review to Vanity Fair over the course of a decade and a half beginning in 1984), Roth identifies at least a couple of the conversations as " written " rather than simply transcribed from a tape recording. With Klíma, Roth reports, he spent two days talking, and then, " in writing, we compressed the heart of our discussion into the exchange that follows. " He visits his old friend Appelfeld in Jerusalem; " After our first afternoon together, " he writes, " we disencumbered ourselves of an interloping tape recorder and, though I took some notes along the way, mostly we talked as we’ve become accustomed to talking — wandering along city streets or sitting in coffee shops. . . .  " Finally, he says, they sat down together and tried to " synthesize on paper . . . the heart of the discussion. "

I make a point of Roth’s method because the feel of this book diverges so dramatically from even the most high-minded collections of interviews. In the Paris Review collections, the interviewer, however famous, usually remains anonymous. But being a Roth book, Shop Talk is not anonymous. The great Jewish yakker, Roth remains his aggressive, jocular, argumentative self, his questions often easily as long as — or longer than — the answers. And so all the Roth obsessions emerge: exile, displacement, Jewishness, assimilation. And the same names keep popping up, Kafka chief among them. He interviews Singer about Bruno Schulz, but his first question to Appelfeld also includes Schulz. He talks with the Czech novelist Klíma in 1990 — about, among other things, Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist Roth interviewed in 1980, and whose interview follows Klíma’s in the book. Kundera fled his country’s Communist regime for France; Klíma stayed behind. And Klíma has some provocative and respectful but not always flattering things to say about the Czech view of Kundera.

The Klíma conversation leads to one of Shop Talk’s other themes — that of tribalism. Which is why Edna O’Brien makes such an easy fit here — an Irish woman who went against her own. Exile, assimilations, the anxieties they provoke all pervade these pieces. Was it usual for a Polish Jew of Schulz’s generation to write in Polish, Roth asks Singer, " or to write in Yiddish, as you did? " " We Yiddish writers, " replies Singer (who would later move to America, where he continued to write in Yiddish), " looked at them as people who had left their roots and culture and become a part of Polish culture, which we considered younger and perhaps less important than our culture. They felt that we Yiddish writers were writing for ignorant people, poor people, people without education, while they were writing for people who went to universities. So we both had a good reason to despise each other. " Likewise, Klíma addresses the criticism that Kundera became an " internationalist " who was no longer writing for Czechs.

Perhaps the soul of the book is Appelfeld, the Bukovinian Jew who escaped a Nazi work camp as a child, wandered in the forests of Ukraine, and eventually found his way to Palestine. Appelfeld’s discussion of Kafka and of the Hebrew language (in which he now writes) is luminous — it’s the best-written interview you’re ever likely to read. He burrows into ethnicity, language, and consciousness itself, especially in his discussions of Hebrew. Kafka, he points out, had beautiful Hebrew handwriting, even better than his German, in that his Hebrew handwriting " has an additional aura of love for the isolated letter. "

There are many other felicities in the book, not the least of which is Roth’s prose, whether he’s describing Levi’s attentiveness as being " focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall " or Appelfeld as a " small, bespectacled, compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head and the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard. " As the cross-references multiply — Kafka, tribal anxieties, the roots of language and identity — you appreciate that here is a writer whose writing sounds like talk, like ordinary conversation, and who offers us conversation that is purely, beautifully " written, " one sentence after another.

V.S. NAIPAUL IS ANOTHER kind of exile, though one could easily imagine him as part of Roth’s mixed tribe. The substance of Reading & Writing (which originally appeared in two parts, as an essay in the New York Review of Books) will be familiar to readers of Naipaul’s other work: the Hindu immigrant childhood in Trinidad, the education in England, the self-education — self-creation, really — of the writer, the later discovery of India, the lost motherland. With its meditation on Trinidad, and on the life of his father, the first half of the essay could almost be a reader’s guide to Naipaul’s first masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). But this particular kind of journey of self-conscious self-discovery is one that he has been taking at least since The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and there are times when it feels as though his story could be translated without much difficulty into Appelfeld’s or Klíma’s or Singer’s. When he writes about the " two spheres of darkness " — the equally mysterious histories of India and Trinidad that become his subjects — he could be describing the same layers of history that entangle the European writers.

Like these post-Holocaust novelists, Naipaul feels cut off from his own history, and he is unable to ground himself in either the English language or English literature. " I couldn’t pretend to be Maugham in London or Huxley or Ackerley in India, " he writes. " I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own. " It’s the lack of " social knowledge " that cuts him off from English and European literature. Or as one of the Indian narrators of his recent novel Half a Life says bluntly of the English romantic poets, " This is just a pack of lies. No one feels like that. " Such passages recall Appelfeld’s childhood — a crazy salad of German, Ruthenian, Romanian, and Ukrainian. " When I finally reached Palestine in 1946, " Appelfeld tells Roth, " my head was full of tongues, but the truth of the matter is that I had no language. "

Appelfeld finds his liberation, his writer’s soul, in Hebrew. As Naipaul charts his course in Reading & Writing, he discovers the colonial history of Trinidad (essentially relating the experience of writing 1962’s The Middle Passage, though he never names it) — English and Spanish conquerors, slavery, vanished aboriginal tribes. And so he discovers not just a " fact about the aborigines " but something that had altered his own past and given him a different sense of " the very beginning of things. "

Another non-fiction book, 1964’s An Area of Darkness, took Naipaul to India, where he discovered yet another hidden history. " It wasn’t an India we could read about. It wasn’t Kipling’s India, or E.M. Forster’s, or Somerset Maugham’s. " Neither is it the " political India, of the freedom movement " with " its great names. " Instead he finds what he called in the title of a later book " a wounded civilization, " the India from " before the British, " the India of Muslim invaders, of dissolution and humiliation. This is a world that can’t be contained in the " borrowed form of the English or European novel. "

Naipaul at one point compares two passages from Dickens, early and late (Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities), using them to contrast the freshness of Dickens at 26 with the novelist of 21 years later whose " hard stare has become technique, impressive but rhetorical, the detail oddly manufactured, the product more of mind and habit than of eye. " The passages contribute to Reading & Writing as a compound genre of memoir, history, and literary criticism in which Naipaul dramatizes how he’s assembled his self from various selves and mixed histories. Although he never finds the kind of centeredness that Appelfeld locates (one of the most regularly invoked words in later Naipaul is " anxiety " ), he comes to a similar self-realization.

IN READING CHEKHOV, long-time New Yorker contributor Janet Malcolm is reader and traveler — a reader of Chekhov who visits his haunts in Moscow and St. Petersburg and Yalta. It’s an odd narrative that finds its own shape, with Malcolm’s flinty gaze bringing heat to her discussions of Chekhov’s stories, his biographers, his critics, his literary relationships with Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova, his personal relationship with Tolstoy — and to her own encounters with Russian people and Russian hotels. The casualness of these encounters aspires to Chekhov’s blend of the accidental and the inevitable — where the accidental is shown to be inevitable. When Malcolm’s luggage mysteriously disappears and just as mysteriously reappears, she notices that though it’s been " rifled, " nothing has been taken. " Grace, as usual, had arrived on flat, silent feet. "

But it’s her readings that most compel interest: her ability to isolate key passages and key details, like Gurov’s gesture of slicing the watermelon in " The Lady with the Pet Dog " ; her observations of the typical Chekhovian " good man who cannot make good " and of the Chekhovian contradiction of the desire for warmth and familiarly but also for the world at large — the dreamy Gurov of Yalta, on vacation, embarking on an extramarital affair, and the worldly Gurov of Moscow who reads three newspapers a day and likes to eat large portions of meat and pickled cabbage " served in a pan, Moscow style. "

Of course, Malcolm, like most of us, is reading in translation. And though she provides a bibliography, I’m hard-pressed to find the beautiful, poetic translation she offers of " The Schoolmistress " (it’s also called " The Cart, " or " In the Cart " ). But it’s part of her achievement that she drives you back to the texts, until you can feel Chekhov in the very air around you (especially when the New England temperature drops and ice begins to crackle under your feet on the sidewalk).

Translation is always a problem when reading " poetic " writers like Chekhov. We all — Malcolm included — read Chekhov with an accent. But as Singer tells Roth in Shop Talk, " I speak all languages with an accent. " To which Roth responds, " Not Yiddish, I take it. " And Singer replies, " Yes. The Litvaks say I speak Yiddish with an accent. "