Free Kindles for Big Readers

A designer from Copenhagen, Philipp Meyer (not the novelist), has created the first comic book for the blind. “Most of the tactile material that is available for blind people is very information dense. It’s always about information and not often about art,” he says.

Recommended Reading: An essay by novelist Siri Hustvedt on the cultural significance of hair from the forthcoming collection Me, My Hair, and I in The New Republic.

Exactly how much does a review in The New York Times matter?

The first reviews of Zadie Smith‘s new collection of essays, Changing My Mind, are in and the general line’s a non-committal, guarded praise. I think it’s wunderkind jealousy, myself.  Voici:  The L.A Times review and The San Francisco Chronicle review.

Tomorrow (January 18th), sites like Wikipedia and Reddit will go dark to protest SOPA. Anyone who’s been online over the past few weeks probably has a vague sense of why this proposed legislation is bad news for the internet as we know it, but Reddit has put up a blog post delving into the language and illustrating the frankly alarming ramifications of its passage.

Javier Marías cogently summarizes all the reasons to stop writing novels immediately, and adds only one reason to write them anyway: “Fiction is the most bearable of worlds.” We reviewed The Infatuations, one of his own twelve works (to date), last year.

Over at Hazlitt, Lesley Buxton’s moving essay on marriage, grief, and understanding will hit you square in the heart. Here’s an essay for The Millions by Lydia Yuknavitch on art and loss that is similarly heavy and no less wonderful.