Robert Rosen

With the weekend upon us, allow me to take a break from my ongoing promotional frenzy and bring your attention to a short photo-essay about our summer vacation by my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, posted today on the Vanity Fair website. We spent a blissful week with my brother's family in a rented house on the ocean in Jonesport, Maine, gorging ourselves on lobster (two dollars per pound!) and anything that could be made with blueberries. The above photo, courtesy of my sister-in-law, Cindy Rosen, was taken from the deck at sunset. (I believe I was sipping a martini at that very moment.)

If you go to the site, you can also see how 31 other VF staffers spent their summer vacations.

I took the summer off to concentrate on the new book I’m writing, Bobby in Naziland, and to recover from my exhausting battle with Amazon to make the print edition of Beaver Street available. For the past ten days I've been chilling with my family in Jonesport, Maine, in a house on the ocean, doing little more than eating too much lobster and blueberry pie as I watched the gothic fog roll in every day, and thought that if I stayed there long enough I'd start to write horror stories. But I wrote nothing while I was there, not even a postcard, and let me tell you, it feels good to go ten days and write absolutely nothing. Now that I'm home and feeling fully recovered, I'm more than ready to launch the Beaver Street autumn offensive, which I'll kick off by getting back in the blogging groove (though not necessarily every day just yet) and preparing for the first event since Bloomsday on Beaver Street.

On Friday, September 14, at 7 P.M., I’ll be reading and signing Beaver Street at the Book House in Albany, New York. And I can thank none other than E. L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, for this opportunity. Ms. James’s mega-blockbusting trilogy has made filth, especially of the S&M variety, palatable to the masses. In tribute to Fifty Shades, I will consider reading an S&M scene from my book. Though I’d like to point out that there is at least one major difference between James’s S&M and my S&M—Beaver Street is nonfiction. So, you 50 million S&M fans, if you’re in the Albany area and you like your S&M real, I hope to see you in September. I suspect you can all use a little literary discipline, if not necessarily a little bondage. Read More