We’ll be featuring an excerpt from Brad Abruzzi’s novel, New Jersey’s Famous Turnpike Witch, in our next issue.
After years of encouragement from literary agents and commercial presses—but no book deal—Abruzzi decided to publish the book himself. At a recent talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the author discusses the history of the relationship between authors and publishers.
In the age of digital media and the internet, Abruzzi asks, are commercial publishers acting as stewards of culture, filtering out in advance books we would never want to read in the first place? Or are they acting as profiteering philistines, holding great literature hostage to the bottom line?
You can watch a video of Abruzzi’s talk, “Amazons, Witches, and Critics – A Liberated Novelist Asks, ‘Now What?’” on the Berkman Center site. The novel is available for download for your ereader or computer at Amazon.com.
Brad Abruzzi is an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at MIT. Brad graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2001, where he served as Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review and published a note on Internet and digital media’s promise for reorientation of the author/publisher/reader relationship. Brad also holds M.A.(New York University, 1998) and A.B.(Princeton University, 1995) degrees in English literature.