Paul Murray is the author, most recently, of Skippy Dies, due in paperback later this month. He spoke by telephone with his editor, Faber and Faber publisher Mitzi Angel, about his next novel, reading Proust, and what stops boys from putting dental floss up their noses. Mitzi Angel: So I heard the big news about David Cameron's holiday reading. Paul Murray: Yes, my agent texted me at seven in the morning last week to say she'd heard David Cameron had brought Skippy Dies on holiday. The Daily Mail had the headline CAMERON BRINGS DARK TALE OF DRUGS AND PORN ON HOLIDAY, which was cool. Angel: A Dark Tale of Drugs and Porn! Maybe that's how we should have described the book in our catalog! Was Skippy the only book he took on holiday with him? Murray: He took Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which sounded to me like your classic aspirational holiday read that never makes it out of the suitcase. But I don't know how much of Skippy he read, either, because a day or two later the protests and looting broke out and he had to cut short his holiday. Though I liked to imagine him sneakily reading it under the table at COBRA meetings.

I was surprised to learn Lapham's Quarterly is only five years old, given it feels firmly at the center of the literary firmament. This is of course due to Lewis Lapham's impeccable taste and, as you'll notice, his inimitable style. Photographer Joshua Simpson and I stopped by their offices to get a look inside the journal's operations. Thanks to Michelle Legro for her help in setting this up.

With summer nearly over, you might be less motivated than usual to trudge through another day at the office. Thankfully Daniel Orozco is here to help. Work in Progress readers will likely remember his short story "Orientation" from May. Now you can...

It's easy to be simultaneously envious of and seduced by Rosamond Bernier's life. She's struck friendships with seemingly every great artist of the 20th century, from Braque to Picasso, Bourgeois to Warhol. (This is addition to her journalism for fashion magazines like Vogue.) As cofounder of the art magazine L'OEIL, Bernier amassed an impressive archive of photographs, some of which she's shared with us. Highlights include a double portrait with her late husband John Russell (a wedding present from Richard Avedon), an oversized birthday card from David Hockney, and Pablo Picasso's inscription in Bernier's copy of El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz.

Frank Bill usually traffics in fiction that hits with the revelatory power of fact—the stories of his debut book, Crimes in Southern Indiana, have the power of bristling frontline reports on the havoc methamphetamines have wreaked on the American heartland. But here Frank steps out from behind his fiction to tell us about a time in southern Indiana when meth was but an exotic treat that came in the mail to only the most enterprising drug dealers. The intervening years would bring all variety of twisted darkness to Corydon, Indiana, but as Frank makes clear here, even in that more innocent time, those looking for trouble—and even those running away from it—had a pretty good chance of finding it. -Sean McDonald, Vice President and Executive Editor, Paperback Director Banger’s family got meth in the mail about once a month. It came from the West Coast in a large manila envelope, moist dandruff flakes lumped to the size of an unfolded diaper. This was before the Sudafed, distilled water, liquid heat, batteries, Coleman fuel, and farmer’s-ammonia craze ignited small-town America, created broken pickets of teeth, catabolized tissue, and scalded the heartland into skin and bone. This was sometime around 1990, when I chewed on adrenaline and spit madness.

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York. I first had the idea to make an immersive text back in the twentieth century. (I thought of it as a hypertext then, but we’ve since decided to call it an immersive text, to distinguish it from 1990s hypertext, about which see below.) I was working as a Web designer in San Francisco, which in those days was a job you could just kind of fall into. The skills you needed to make Web pages were arcane enough that most people didn’t want to learn them, but not so arcane that they were actually difficult, so I and some friends from Stanford (literature people: I’d just dropped out of their PhD program in Comp Lit) taught ourselves HTML and went into business. We rented an office in South Park, which was the epicenter of the tech industry in San Francisco. Everyone had a business plan. You couldn’t eat lunch in the park without overhearing someone’s scheme to monetize something by putting it on the Web. Once I went out to dinner with a friend, and the head of a software company offered us jobs, just because we were eating dinner in South Park and we looked kind of gangly. (Later the same guy ran off with his company’s money, so it’s just as well we turned him down.)

The following essay is excerpted from the epilogue of André Aciman's new collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  He is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan. I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learned to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. "Back" to France was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever even set foot in France. But France—and Paris—was my soul home, my imaginary home, and will remain so all my life, even if, after three days in France, I cannot wait to get out. Not a single ounce of me is French.

Though Train Dreams has only recently been issued in hardcover, many readers first read it in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review. And what an issue: Johnson's novella shared space with new work by Aleksandar Hemon and Rick Moody. To mark the occasion, The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center has generously shared some of Johnson’s notes and drafts from his archive, which is currently being processed. Many know the Ransom Center from their acquisition of David Foster Wallace's papers. (Or rather, that's how I first heard of it.) I visited  this past March while in town for SXSW, and only upon entering their gleaming new facility did I realize they've amassed a world-class collection of writers' papers, including Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and, most recently, J.M. Coetzee. You can lose days in their collections. Here you'll find fragments of various Train Dreams drafts and notes, as well as revisions of Johnson's essay "Why I Write."

Jeffrey Eugenides stopped by the FSG offices a couple weeks ago, in advance of his book tour for The Marriage Plot. We used the opportunity to let his Facebook fans ask a few questions, some of which are featured in the video below. Q. In the introduction for My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead you speak of the concept of a “love story” and provide a selection of short stories in that vein. Which novels do you believe also fit the mold of a “love story,” and did they influence your writing of The Marriage Plot?

John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead ranges across America, from Christian rock festivals to Axl Rose, from unheralded blues musicians to the WB show "One Tree Hill." (TIME's Lev Grossman calls Sullivan the next Tom Wolfe: "JJS, as I have come to think of him, may be the best essayist of his generation.") Sullivan's book tour is taking him across the United States, during which he's posting photos on Tumblr. A few highlights:

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire spans just four years in New York City, but that's all Will Hermes needs to showcase the explosion of progress between rock, salsa, hip hop, dance, jazz, and classical music. To take just one example: during a seven-day stretch in 1973 you could catch a Soho loft performance by Phillip Glass, the New York Dolls at CBGBs, or a Bronx block party powered by DJ Kool Herc's homemade sound system. Hermes created a few chronological playlists, for lack of a better term, highlighting one-month spans in 1973, 1974, and 1975. From Lou Reed to Jon Gibson, Al Green to Kraftwerk, Patti Smith to Miles Davis. Enjoy.

Censorship and Obscenity Henry Hitchings was born in 1974. He is the author of The Secret Life of Words, Who’s Afraid of Jane Austen?, and Defining the World. He has contributed to many newspapers and magazines and is the theater critic for the London Evening Standard. The following is an adapted excerpt from his book The Language Wars: A History of Proper English. Political correctness is an invitation to practise self-censorship: to conform to a model of fairness. This brings us to the larger issue of what we are not permitted to say, what we are discouraged from saying, and what we elect to say only in very particular circumstances. Censorship has a long history, and so does opposition to it. Indeed, it is the practice of policing what people are allowed to say that creates opportunities for subterfuge. The main concern of censorship is smothering ideas, yet because language is the vehicle of ideas censorship has often seemed to be above all else an attempt to muffle language or extinguish it. You can jail a person, but not an idea. There are two forms of censorship. One is interference in advance of publication – by the state or by some other authority such as the Church. The other is action after publication: lawsuits and financial penalties.

Bill Loehfelm was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Staten Island. He is the author of the novels Fresh Kills (which won an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award), Bloodroot, and The Devil She Knows. Loehfelm lives in New Orleans with his wife, the...

Frank Bill lives and writes in southern Indiana. Crimes in Southern Indiana is his first book. You can follow him on Twitter @HouseOfGrit. Volt by Alan Heathcock I picked this book up and immediately wished I’d scribed the damn thing myself. The first...

Sheila Heti is the author of three books of fiction: The Middle Stories, Ticknor, and How Should a Person Be? In July 2011 Faber and Faber published her nonfiction book The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live,...

James Renner is the author of two books of nonfiction that detail his adventures in investigative journalism: Amy: My Search for Her Killer and The Serial Killer’s Apprentice. His novel The Man from Primrose Lane will be published by Sarah Crichton Books...

Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, and StoryQuarterly. He was awarded...

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS (FSG, March...

Justin Taylor is the author of The Gospel of Anarchy and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Check him out at http://www.justindtaylor.net These next books are mostly titles published this year, but also a few things that I finally got around to. The Bigger...