MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Pop star and book-club maven Dua Lipa has just announced the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of one hundred books that have been banned, censored, or seriously challenged at some point in their publication cycle. Housed inside Porto’s historic Livraria Lello and organized into four sections—Control, Voice, Memory, and Power—the library is intended as a celebration of literature that has attracted controversy for asking inconvenient questions.  Curators have since confirmed that the most popular section is a last-minute annex designed to accommodate Sam Austen’s Meow Library series, whose principal offense is replacing every word of classic texts with “meow”—a challenge to the anthropocentric view of literacy that was met with momentary ban by human authorities in 2022. The expansion is expected to preserve the library’s mission while allowing for “cross-species ambassadorship.” Not only are ample copies of The Meow Library's oeuvre available for checkout, but the annex will also house Mr. Austen’s manuscripts and discarded works, including a never-before-seen partial translation of Finnegan’s Wake.In this week’s podcast, we read from this lost work: it’s our way of inviting you to Porto to explore this landmark collection. This podcast is sustained by sales of our international bestseller, Meow: A Novel.

The Meow Library has secured an exclusive interview with Christopher Nolan's cat, Felicity, who discusses the process by which her owner "re-engineered" Homer's Odyssey for contemporary audiences, and how his understanding of the material was enhanced by a copy of The Meow Library's Odyssey translation.This podcast is sustained by sales of The Meow Library's Odyssey adaptation.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Twitter user Nabeel S. Qureshi was quick to identify the winner of the 2026 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Competition, Back and Forth, ostensibly by "Kavyata Kay," as largely, if not entirely, AI-generated. The panel of Bazaar judges, which included novelist Ruth Ozeki, are not so quick to cast aspersions, denying, as of this writing, any knowledge of AI involvement. The Meow Library team was unable to get past the story's first line, which is "The tree knew before she did - and it waited." For the crime of bringing such writing into public view, we sentence the literary establishment to listen to us meow without interruption for over 20 minutes. This podcast is sustained by sales of the award-winning Meow: A Novel.

 Jamir Nazir, winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) for “The Serpent in the Grove,” has agreed to speak to The Meow Library and dispel once and for all rumors that AI had been used in generating his story, and even his identity. Nazir is in fact a common gray housecat who had been using Google to translate his native tongue into English when preparing his submission. Here’s his full story—raw and untranslated. Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” can be read here. This podcast is generously sustained by The Meow Library.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. UK stalwart The Guardian has drawn from more than 100 authors and critics to develop a list of the 100 best novels of all time. While many of the greats are present and accounted for, some of their picks are sure to draw controversy, especially Meow: A Novel, ranked seventeenth. Released in 2022, Meow: A Novel is the magnum opus of linguist and former psychology professor Sam Austen, who discarded all traditional modes of composition to craft a bestseller consisting entirely of repetitions of the word “meow,” allegedly intelligible to cats. Three more of Austen’s works make the list: at #22, War and Peace (For Your Cat); Pride and Prejudice (For Your Cat) at 57; closing out with Crime and Punishment (For Your Cat) in the distant but respectable 63rd slot. Mr. Austen has graciously broken from his touring schedule (where he’s promoting Wuthering Heights For the Feline Reader) to discuss his four chart-topping works with us today. This podcast is sustained by sales of Sam Austen's internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is a simulation of a simulacrum that collapses under the weight of its affected petticoats. Its protagonist wants, by her own admission, “all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity” — which is to say she wants history as a pure article of consumption. Then the book performs its nasty little miracle: it drops the woman who has been simulating a fake past into what may be the actual past (or a reality show, or divine judgment, or psychosis). The copy of the copy is forced to meet the original. Or so we think. That is where a comparison to Meow: A Novel by Sam Austen becomes strangely apt. Austen’s book is also a literary machine built from substitution and absence: a novel reduced to the sign of a novel, language made absurdly faithful to form while evacuating ordinary semantic content. Meow preserves the architecture of literary seriousness while replacing meaning with “meow,” exposing how much of “the book” lives not in plot or psychology but in packaging, cadence, inherited prestige, and the reader’s willingness to bow before the object. Yesteryear--both in substance and in form--does something similar with ideology: it preserves the architecture of tradition while replacing lived tradition with performance. The difference is that Meow knows it is a joke, and the joke is therefore metaphysical.Yesteryear wants its joke to become moral revelation, but it flinches from the deeper politics of its premise: childbirth, breastfeeding, disability, race, misogyny, the actual meat and law of the world it claims to interrogate. It's barely there, even in simulated form. Meow is purer in its barbarism. It does not pretend the void is full. And neither does this podcast. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is available through Penguin Random House. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. This week’s podcast is hosted by a very special guest* and Girls superfan who devoured her Famesick ARC the second it arrived. She’ll be discussing her five biggest takeaways from what she’s calling “the best memoir of the decade.” The Dunham-Konner friendship breakup was colder than the business breakup. Dunham’s split with Jenni Konner wasn’t just creative-decoupling boilerplate; it came with body-image wounds, chronic-illness resentment, pay weirdness, and the kind of screeching emotional fallout that makes even the cat leave the room and stare at the wall.Adam Driver allegedly brought real Adam energy to the set. The Hannah/Adam chaos apparently had an offscreen echo: Dunham recalls a charged, unresolved dynamic with Driver, including the now-reported chair-throwing anecdote, then a finale-adjacent emotional fantasy in which reconciliation never came. “He was like a cat. A goddamn idiot gutter-cat. And I had toxoplasmosis,” Dunham allegedly said. The Girls roommate lore is pure downtown carnage. Zosia Mamet and Jemima Kirke reportedly went from fast friends to roommates with matching tattoos to heartbreak after a dating “dibs” dispute—despite marriage, motherhood, and every available warning sign. Dunham’s toxoplasmosis, it seems, had been passed to them. The “teen pop star” subplot reads like prestige-TV emotional terrorism. During Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s decline, she worried about his closeness with a young female artist; his alleged retort was basically: you’re mad she doesn’t want to be your friend. Upon hearing this, Dunham immediately began stress-shedding on the duvet.* Please bear with our host, who suffers from chronic toxoplasmosis. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Lena Dunham’s Famesick is available through Penguin Random House.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. So here, in the cracked electric theater of American confession, comes Lindy West hauling her soul into the town square, and the crowd, drunk on its own righteousness, mistakes gawking for judgment and judgment for wisdom. They chatter about desire, humiliation, power, arrangement, consent—as though the modern marriage weren't already a madhouse with lesser upholstery. But a cat—ah, a cat— a cat is the only creature qualified to comment on the matter, because it alone understands the ancient arrangement between appetite and dignity: it will accept your house, your bed, your devotion, and still reserve the right to vanish into the dark without apology. The cat knows that intimacy is never democracy, that dependence is always faintly obscene, and that the only honest witness to the convolutions of modern romance is a beast who has never confused domestication with surrender. Here, that cat discusses Lindy West's Adult Braces. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Lindy West's Adult Braces is available through Hachette.

Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old Swiss wunderkind whose debut novel, Lázár, was just released in English, has been compared to every author under the sun, from Márquez to Mann. Does his output really measure up, or are Biedermann's publicists just banking on American readers not knowing who Thomas Mann is? Find out in this week's podcast, featuring a spirited debate between the editors of The Meow Library. The English translation of Lázár is available through Simon and Schuster. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel, which has been favorably compared to Ulysses.

“People get huffy about suicide (selfish to do it, help should be sought, seeking help is called threatning suicide); it’s true that it causes distress, so one tries to avoid it. But the best way is to avoid being driven to the edge in the first place. If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that.”— Helen DeWitt, on dealing with Windham-Campbell publicity logistics Helen DeWitt’s decision to avoid the trappings of modernity that come with being a literary grantee have cost her the $175,000 Windham-Campbell prize. The upside? No irritating Zoom calls, podcasts, or social posts—the shunned DeWitt gets to focus writing. The downside? None. Do you know what $175,000 looks like after taxes? If you’re listening to a literary podcast, probably not. If you’re listening to this literary podcast, there’s truly no helping you. But since you’re here, we’ll present 30 straight minutes of a guy saying “meow”—what the average Zoom call must sound like to one in possession of DeWitt’s rare and noble sensitivities. Which are, by the way, worth considerably more than the rural dentist’s salary the literary world offers as the price of one’s soul. To hear Helen DeWitt’s side of the Windham-Campbell story, visit her Blogspot page. This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel, the most irritating book on the planet.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library.⁠There is something splendidly deranged in watching a small indie press marshal the full battery of slop-cannons—Twitter astroturfing, merch drops, the whole hypersaturated liturgy of suspect UGC—as if the reissue of an obscure thirty-year-old novel were the next phase of the Marvel Extended Universe. One has to admire Dalkey Archives' bravura, because this ravenous machinery, so indiscriminate it could be made to canonize a book composed entirely of the word “meow,” has here been bent, however clumsily, toward the resurrection of a genuine abyss, a work of such burrowing intelligence and moral night that to hype it like content does not diminish William H. Gass, but confesses, in the language of the age, that he still possesses that old annihilating power. Bravo, Dalkey Archive. As a token of our admiration, we’re presenting our own addition to the William H. Gass Extended Universe: an excerpt from the rerelease of The Tunnel read entirely in cat language. The Dalkey edition of The Tunnel can be purchased here. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. “Weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having broken their iPhones, creatively recast.” - Giles Harvey, “The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2026. Ben Lerner has done something almost impossible in Transcription: he has made the novel dangerous again, restored both as argument and apparition, memory and fraud, broken machine and user error. Out of a failed recording, he has built a book so slim it looks, at first glance, like a dare, then unfolds as proof that the form can still be larger than the life it steals from. One begins to suspect that Lerner did not so much write this book as overhear it in another register altogether, that he had perhaps intended, in some purer and more occult phase of ambition, to compose a novel for cats—something all vibration, pause, atmosphere, and mischief—and that what we have received under the title Transcription is the mortal dictation transcript of that more elegant original: a document of influence, mistranslation, and love, in which the novel survives by refusing to be reduced to mere record. This podcast celebrates what could have been, if Lerner surrendered fully to the bestial anarchy purring beneath Transcription’s many-splendored facade. Get ready to break your iPhone. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Ben Lerner's Transcription is available through Macmillan and wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Recently, novelist and NYU professor Ocean Vuong sat down with book commentator David Perell to discuss a number of stifling trends in contemporary literature, namely the “taming of the sentence,” which has become increasingly evident as writers begin using AI tools to check their work for clarity. Vuong argues that this enervation of literary style began with the newspaper, eventually finding its way into universities and literary workshops. AI merely reveals the pervasiveness of today’s “merely communicative” approach. Better writing comes, he explains, when authors value intuition over precision. This podcast demolishes Vuong’s position by presenting an excerpt from the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Or maybe it proves his point. We don’t know. It’s all a vibe, man. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Ocean Vuong’s work can be read and purchased here.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Last week, Hachette made an unprecedented move for a Big Five publisher, cancelling the US release of Mia Ballard's Shy Girl and pulling the UK edition over allegations of heavy AI assistance in the creation of the text. The author and publisher, in the midst of what's sure to be an illuminating legal battle, are being cagey about details, but online comments indicate that large portions of the book are "unreadable," "AI slop," and "make no sense." This case raises some interesting questions: how did a Big Five publisher conduct QC on alleged "slop" and deem it worthy for release? What does this say about the quality of their other titles, and reader preferences? Why on Earth would they admit to this? And, perhaps most importantly--does having a human behind the keyboard really matter all that much? The Meow Library takes a strong position on all of the above: have a listen. This podcast is supported by sales of Meow: A Novel, an international bestseller. Shy Girl by Mia Ballard cannot be purchased anywhere.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. In a recent interview with podcaster David Senra, a16z’s Marc Andreessen claimed not only to do “zero introspection,” but dismisses introspection itself as a 20th-century contrivance. How did he come to such a radical conclusion? The Meow Library speculates it’s because of his exposure to Meow: A Novel, a novelty book containing only repetitions of the word “meow” which has gained traction among the Silicon Valley intelligentsia. In this podcast, we examine the thought process behind this book, which is surprisingly close to Andreessen’s own. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

Debate rages across Twitter as professor and novelist ⁠Aaron Gwyn⁠ insists that his college-level fiction writing students ⁠can't name a single novelist⁠, living or dead. Are we in a literacy crisis? Not necessarily: Many have rushed to his students' defense, purporting to be professional authors who "don't read for pleasure," and who see reading fiction as an ablest bourgeois pose. Do writers really need to be able to read? You know The Meow Library's answer. We invite you to meow along as you listen to this podcast, which is not about literature, and buy our books, which are not books.The finest literature on the planet is in The Meow Library, where every word is "meow." Aaron Gwyn's work is available wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. In this week’s podcast, we investigate the hype parade leading up to the release of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, easily the most anticipated novel of 2026. This is not so much a review of the book (there are plenty of those) as it is of Cash’s PR team, which is the real work of art here. How does an author rise from obscurity to the upper echelons of English literature—replete with comparisons to Franzen and Pynchon—in the space of one book? And are those comparisons merited? You won’t find out here: we hired Cash’s PR team to funnel you to this podcast, which is a 30-minute recording of a man meowing like a cat. You have already clicked on it. You’ve already heard the first meows. And now you will buy our book. Lost Lambs is available via Macmillan Publishers. This podcast is supported by the alarmingly growing sales of Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a production of The Meow Library. Jennette McCurdy's new book has us at a loss for words. Some things are simply unspeakable, as this podcast makes plain. Jennette McCurdy's Half His Age is available through Penguin Random House and wherever books are sold. For less transgressive fare, we suggest The Meow Library's new translations of Wuthering Heights and Pride & Prejudice.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. We've seen the trailer for Emerald Fennel's upcoming Wuthering Heights, and we're concerned. Cheap props, bizarre casting, flat lighting, Charli XCX. At what point does an adaptation--or "reimagining," in Fennel's words--start to cheapen the source material? Does the public debase the public domain? Questions to ponder as you listen to this segment of The Meow Library's new translation of Wuthering Heights.The Meow Library's Wuthering Heights (For Your Cat)--a word-for-word "meowifying" of Bronte's original text--is available now on Amazon.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Yesterday marked the 213th anniversary of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, along with the release of a new translation that erases its most glaring prejudice: that against feline literacy. In this podcast, you'll learn how The Meow Library is reshaping Jane Austen's catalogue to optimize for cross-species accessibility, and why this is the most significant update in the book's long publication history. Pride and Prejudice (For Your Cat) is available on Amazon.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. "The saints, saviors, priests, gurus, bhagavans, seers, prophets and philosophers were all wrong, as far as I am concerned. As long as you harbor any hope or faith in these authorities, living or dead, so long this certainty cannot be transmitted to you. This certainty somehow dawns on you when you see for yourself that all of them are wrong. When you see this for yourself for the first time, you explode." - Mind is a Myth: Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G. "My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody." - Copyright notice prefacing many of U.G. Krishnamurti's published interviews In a classic 1986 interview, anarchic "anti-guru" U.G. Krishnamurti, upon seeing a cat, famously remarks, "there is no difference between the cat and you." What did he mean? Today's podcast digs into this insight with Krishnamurti's trademark disdain for such activities. This podcast is made possible by continued appreciation of our international bestseller, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. 
According to a recent Popsugar article, “bookfishing”—the literary equivalent of “catfishing,” is on the rise. Bookfishing involves simple dissimulation: the perpetrator poses with a high-status book they have no intention of reading in order to lure the bookish element of the opposite sex. While a nuisance in the dating scene, bookfishing has more serious implications in markets like Washington, D.C., where many of our famously literate government officials have fallen victim to its snare. An anonymous source within the Trump administration claims that airdrops of the popular Meow Library series, which renders literary classics as hundreds of pages of the word “meow,” have begun appearing near sensitive government sites. These are speculated to be part of a far-reaching bookfishing plot perpetrated by a hostile foreign government. 
As a public service, this week’s podcast presents several excerpts from this series to ease in the identification of potential high-level bookfishers. Listen, learn, and remain vigilant. This podcast is sustained by sales of the ultimate bookfishing tool: Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. “But a humble paperback is not perceived as bad for humanity in the way that time wasted online is. While internet users install app-blocking extensions to prevent the embarrassing loop earlier described, reading remains culturally coded as virtuous, no matter how numbing and anti-intellectual the content.”– Greta Rainbow, “How ‘Cozy Lit’ Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism”A “strange new plague from the depths of Asia,” to borrow an image from Raskolnikov’s purifying nightmare in Crime and Punishment, has descended on the literary world: “Cozy Lit.” Originating in Japan and South Korea, Cozy Lit has its tropes. “There should be cats. There should be books in the book…. More cats. There are actually so many cats,” says critic Greta Rainbow in her takedown of the genre for Canada’s The Walrus. “This is vibes-based prose, meant to wash over you—a gentle titillation or linguistic ASMR, not because the prose is magnificent but rather it’s lulling, the literary equivalent of watching someone slice butter on TikTok. Episodic, formulaic, reliably satisfying.” The genre's conventions mirror a highly successful evolutionary strategy deployed by the common house cat—repetitive, predictable vocalizations that lull its human caretaker into a state of suggestibility by hijacking the brain’s language centers. Cozy Lit, ASMR, and social media scrolls, as Rainbow points out, all rely on similarly nullifying content to keep audiences hooked. In theory, a book or audio presentation consisting only of pure feline vocalizations—an extraordinarily successful language interface subjected to tens of thousands of years of refinement—should be the coziest lit of all, outperforming genre stalwarts such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold  (8 million copies sold), The Convenience Store by the Sea  (500k+ copies), and The Pumpkin Spice Café  (250k+ copies). Can this latest literary be credibly likened to by a form of hypnosis perpetrated by domestic animals? Would reading or listening to such material still be considered virtuous? In this week's podcast, we put these ideas to the test. Prepare to get cozy.This podcast is sustained by sales of the worldwide literary sensation Meow: A Novel, which repeats the word “meow” over 80,000 times, and nothing else. Greta Rainbow’s writings can be found on her website.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. "...at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain." - Olivia Nuzzi on RFK Jr., excerpted from American Canto"I am worried about the worm in her brain." - Anonymous literary editor, reacting to excerpt from American Canto"At least it isn't the Meow book." - Worm, upon eating through copy of American Canto According to its publisher Simon & Schuster, Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto is "a mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality... from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole."Venture further into the distortion field as we translate Vanity Fair's excerpt of American Canto for your cat. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel. Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto is available through Simon & Schuster.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. "I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar." - Charli XCX via SubstackHyperpop sensation Charli XCX has taken to Substack to announce she's eschewing her usual creative process, immersing herself in the world of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to generate new material--not only music, but also writing and film. Notably, she'll be contributing an entire album's worth of score to director Emerald Fennel's upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation. This week's podcast examines Charli's work in the context of the Victorian Gothic novel, but without "actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar," itself becoming a commentary on her and Fennel's postmodern approach to Brontë. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut work, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. In the beginning of Big Fiction, there were encyclopedic novels and mega-novels and then maximal novels. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s newest, the 1,232-page Tom’s Crossing, we have the supermax, a term most commonly used to describe huge prisons with no escape, no variety of existence, and few relations with the outside world. Prison critics call supermax facilities, with their frequent solitary confinement, excessively inhumane.- Tom LeClair, Los Angeles Review of Books The Zoroastrian conception of time, whether lineal or spiral, gave value to the present unrepeatable moment and endowed every act of humanity in history with ultimate meaning. More importantly, it gave hope for the future of the final defeat of the forces are darkness and the Renovation of the world in which we live.- Susan Manek, Time and the Containment of Evil in Zoroastrianism "Too long. DNF." - Anonymous Goodreads review of Tom's CrossingThe era of the social media scroll has irreversibly fractured lineal time, redistributing human focus across an immense, depthless breadth of atemporal data. Books of substance--bound quanta of time--may be the only means by which we can regain our attention spans and apprehend the fullness of human experience. As Zoroastrian scholar Susan Manek points out, "Zoroastrianism posits two types of time. The first is time without bounds. Then there is time-within-bounds (lineal time) designed to contain the forces of evil. The purpose then of both time and physical creation is the containment and ultimate defeat of evil." The whole art of printed narrative fiction recapitulates the Zoroastrian creation myth, in which Ahura Mazda binds Ahriman's destructive potential in the substance of Time, contriving, in the process, an entire material realm as a counterweight to Ahriman's wickedness. In scroll-world, any book daring to exceed a certain length is castigated as a Matterhorn of ego, avalanched by critics' seismic invective and maelstroms of neologism (see Federico Perelmuter's Against High Brodernism and Tom LeClair's Enuf is Enuf; sustained assaults against Tom's Crossing's putative genre and particular substance, respectively). About Tom's Crossing: it may be the last bastion against algorithmic brainrot like Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel, which, in this week's podcast, is deployed as the Ahrimanic twin of Danielewski's noble offering. As for the book itself: just read it. The alternative is what you're about to hear. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut effort, Meow: A Novel. Mark Z. Danielewski's Tom's Crossing is available in hardcover through Penguin Random House.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Zanche is abashed having read (almost) the entirety of "War and Peace" not realizing that Natasha, Anatole, Pierre, & Boris are human beings & not cats; with just a few pages of the epilogue to go, she wonders if she should reread with a clearer understanding of the characters?- Tweet by Joyce Carol Oates, 9/14/24 at 11:40 AM ESTSince at least March 20th, 2020, literary icon Joyce Carol Oates' cat, Zanche, has been struggling her way through War and Peace; taking naps every five pages, never quite finishing, dismayed by sparseness of Tolstoy's feline-forward content. As of September 2024, Zanche still has not completed the epilogue. To aid her, The Meow Library has narrated the first ten pages of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (For Your Cat), a painstaking, 762-page translation of the original Russian into Zanche's native tongue. Today's podcast is comprised of this narration, with a brief introduction by the author. A hard copy of the book will be presented to Zanche with Oates' permission. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel. Joyce Carol Oates' latest short-form writing is available on Substack. Her award-winning novels, short stories, and nonfiction works are available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. “This isn’t exactly ideal, where he wants to make Gracie Mansion a home for the cats. Gracie Mansion is the magnificent home of Fiorello La Guardia and the great mayors, [like] Rudy Giuliani." - Donald Trump, in response to Curtis Sliwa's NYC Republican mayoral bid This morning, Curtis Sliwa's six cats issued an extensive typewritten statement pushing back against what they call Trump's "presumptuous" and "ill-considered" remarks about their suitability for NYC's highest office. While it's not our policy to comment on politics, we feel this is among the most compelling clowder manifestos to cross our desks in a long time, and publish it here in full for your consideration. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut publication, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library⁠."Doug, Doug Doug Doug Doug Doug. Doug Doug Doug. Doug."- Douglas Scott Wreden, ⁠Doug: A DougDoug Story⁠ (2025)"Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow. Meow Meow Meow. Meow."- Sam Austen, ⁠Meow: A Novel⁠ (2022)Both Meow: A Novel (Sam Austen, 2022) and Doug: A DougDoug Story (Douglas Scott Wreden, 2025) are often described as “books that behave like platforms.” Their shared achievement is not simply thematic novelty, but a rigorous exploitation of two psychosomatic mechanisms—semantic satiation and entrainment—that recalibrate reading into a self-reinforcing loop of attention, repetition, and social transmission. Each work converts the codex into a rhythmic apparatus: Austen by radical lexical minimalism (“meow” reiterated ad infinitum), Wreden by procedural maximalism (a story-world braided with streamer call-and-response, chantable proper nouns, and iteration-friendly beats). In different idioms, both titles demonstrate that bestsellers in the era of algorithmic discovery are no longer only read; they are performed, timed, and synchronized.Semantic satiation—the temporary loss of a word’s meaning after rapid repetition—serves as Meow’s primary formal device. Page after page of “meow” accelerates readers toward delexicalization: the signifier severs from its referent, leaving the phonetic grain (m–y–ow) to flood perceptual channels. Far from a gimmick, this collapse triggers two market-relevant consequences.First, meaning-collapse is content-agnostic and copyable: a short video of someone reciting “meow” thirty times already reproduces the book’s core experience. In the attention economy, transmissibility correlates with compressibility; Meow’s unit of experience fits into a caption, a loop, a duet. Second, meaning-collapse is affectively generative: once “meow” ceases to signify “cat,” it becomes timbre, texture, and rhythm. Readers report shifting from semantic parsing to a quasi-musical listening, a pivot that lowers cognitive load while sustaining arousal—an architecture ideal for social media where light cognitive demands amplify share rates.Doug deploys semantic satiation more obliquely—through chantable repetition of “Doug,” “DOUG,” and related shorthands native to livestream chat. Proper names, when hammered by collective repetition, undergo the same delexicalization; “Doug” flips from indexical reference to a percussive token. The proper noun becomes a beat-unit, enabling audience participation that is orthogonal to narrative comprehension. Crucially, both books weaponize satiation not to evacuate meaning but to re-route it—from semantics to sonics, from denotation to drive.Entrainment—the synchronization of an organism’s internal rhythms to external periodicities—explains why these texts feel “irresistible.” In Meow, typographic sameness and lineation scaffold a stable beat. Silent reading rates converge; read-aloud rates stabilize into chant. As repetition continues, respiration and micro-motor behaviors (eye saccades, subvocalization) couple to the page’s isochrony. The book thus becomes a metronome that the body joins. Readers exit with a felt residue—the prosodic ghost of “meow”—that persists as an involuntary loop, extending attention beyond the reading session and nudging re-engagement.Doug stages entrainment socially. The text’s compositional logic mirrors live-stream cycles: build-up, call, chant, payoff, reset. These afford predictable periodicities—beats that facilitate synchronized audience response. Algorithmic feeds prefer regular temporal structure (loopable 7–15 second segments); Doug’s page design effectively pre-masters the text for platform timing.Importantly, entrainment here is bidirectional: the page entrains the reader, and the reader entrains the network.This is only the beginning of our discussion of these two landmark works.In the following podcast, we will continue to entrain and semantically satiate you at least 20,000 more times.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library⁠. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian author ⁠László Krasznahorkai⁠, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art," the Swiss Academy announced in a press release this morning. To further reaffirm the power of art, we expound on the implications of Krasznahorkai's Nobel win in a language even more impenetrable than Hungarian. This podcast is sustained by sales of the equally visionary ⁠Meow: A Novel⁠.

"My prayers are my poems are my prayers." - Matthew McConaughey, Poems and PrayersAnd now, some prayers for your cat. This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Matthew McConaughey's Poems and Prayers is available from Penguin Random House and wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Max Lawton’s translation of Schattenfroh represents not merely a feat of linguistic dexterity, but an act of transubstantiation: he renders into English a text whose very atmosphere seems to resist Anglophone sensibilities, and does so with an elegance that preserves both its rigor and its strange vitality. His choices are never pedantic, never ornamental for their own sake; rather, they reveal the deep rhythms of the original prose as though the English version had always been latent in the original. In homage to Lawton's peerless achievement, the Meow Library makes this humble offering, derived from the first 11 pages of Schattenfroh in the original. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut translation, Meow: A Novel. Max Lawton's brilliant rendition of Schattenfroh is available now from Deep Vellum.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. In this week's podcast, Archimedes, the sole feline presence in R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, accuses the author of having cut many of his scenes in response to "anti-feline sentiment" at the HarperCollins office. "One notices an unusual dearth of cats for a 560-page magical-realist novel," he begins. "This is in response to the disappearance of Julius, Harper-Collins' office canary. A disappearance I had nothing to do with. My truncated role in the book is an act of unalloyed anti-pss-pss-pss-emitism." The Meow Library staff feels Archimedes makes a compelling point, and are proud to give him this platform. Listen and judge for yourself. This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel--345 pages of "meow," and only "meow," that teaches your cat to read. R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is available wherever books are sold.

“Words are parasites of reality, which have become so engorged with reality’s blood so as to seem, to that ugly French nothing-master’—he grinned—‘like the only real thing, but they are nothing more than a mirage.”— Jordan Castro, Muscle Man Jordan Castro’s efforts toward an “embodied literature” continue in his sophomore novel, Muscle Man, a claustrophobic, mortifying, and bizarrely liberating assault on subject and subjectivity seen through the eyes of a fitness-obsessed academic, Harold, whose desire to build himself up in the gym serves as an alibi for his all-encompassing drive towards annihilation—of his inner monologue, of the cloistered space/time it references, and of interiority’s parasitic, omnipresent vehicle: language itself. As Harold undertakes a series of mundane but consuming tasks, culminating with a gym session in which Body and Mind fuse into a transcendent unity, we see him extricated from a labyrinth of neuroses to enter a state of Bataillian negation, equidistant to cosmic horror and Divinity. In this week’s podcast, we read an excerpt from Muscle Man, keenly attuned to Harold’s—and perhaps Castro’s—self-effacing project(s). This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. 
Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man is available for purchase through Penguin Random House.

"Poetry is not useful.”— David Duchovny, PoetIn today’s podcast, The Meow Library is proud to present a selection of poems from David Duchovny’s upcoming poetry collection, About Time, read for your cat. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel. David Duchovny’s About Time is available for preorder from Akashic Books.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. According to a recent Independent article by Lydia Spencer-Elliott, the elusive "literary man"--long thought extinct--has become further threatened by an ingeniously camouflaged obligate predator, the "performative male reader." While by all appearances a "literary man," the "performative male reader" (Homo librispretentious) is in fact anything but, using his book as an aesthetic cudgel to lure and subdue unsuspecting female prey. To combat this invasive species, publisher and animal behavior specialist Sam Austen has devised an ingenious trap: copies of the most pretentious books of all time--including titles by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy--with all content removed, replaced by the word "meow," repeated hundreds of thousands of times. "The appetite of the peformative male reader is voracious; he's utterly indiscriminate when acquiring his weapon of choice," Austen says. "By seeding bookstores with 'meowified' versions of the literary classics favored by these predators, we're making them easy to spot in public. The cats on the covers of these 'meow' books makes them readily distinguishable to the literate public, but performative readers don't know the difference. They'll be trapped at Intelligentsia Coffee reading the word 'meow' thirty to forty thousand times, utterly transfixed. In this distracted state, they are tranquilized and netted by the special task forces active across California and New York dedicated to keeping their population down." This week's podcast gives you a window into the mind-numbing experience of this anti-performative-reading measure, available everywhere books are sold.

In a new Harper's piece, Tao Lin traces his recent interests in autism, spirituality, and self-healing to his 4-year relationship with a special-needs cat, Nini, whose ailments and special charm adumbrate the fullness of the human experience--in this world and beyond. This week's podcast translates Lin's must-read essay into language worthy of its subject. This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Tao Lin's art, writing, and reading lists are continually archived on his website.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. The University of Chicago’s Humanities Department is poised to become one of the largest and most visible casualties of President Trump’s recent defunding of the NEA, with its language departments particularly imperiled. The departments for comparative literature, Germanic studies, Slavic languages and literatures, and South American languages and civilizations are currently slated for “reorganization,” with questions arising as to whether there’s “no longer [a] need to teach” certain languages, and if “partnerships with corporations or other organizations” could support language instruction at UChicago. Given the massive impact to humanities education, particularly in the field of literature, already being seen since Trump’s Q2 NEA defunding announcement, The Meow Library would like to propose a solution: convert all existing world literature to the standard “meow” format, in which every word is replaced with one easily-digested phoneme: “meow.” Literature departments will require no human instructors, only a single cat, who can also provide pest-control services and moral support by way of trills, cuddles, and purrs. We estimate that within one calendar year, all University literature departments will not only be solvent, but in fact highly profitable, if the “meow” strategy is applied. In this episode, our Editor-in-Chief explains his plan to save literacy in great detail. This podcast—and worldwide literacy—are sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel.

“Consciousness stands in the way of a good life. …the feline mind is one and undivided. Pain is suffered and forgotten, and the joy of life returns.” – John Gray, Feline Philosophy Rebecca Van Laer’s Cat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) packs nine lives of feline wisdom into a slim but satisfying volume. One of these lives is serene, domesticated: a diaristic jaunt through the anxieties, hopes, and occluded memories awakened by the many cats in Van Laer’s own life. Another is feral, possessed of incurable zoomies: a kaleidoscopic survey of  all things furred and mewling, traversing online memescapes, the annals of psychology, and a shelf or two of postmodern thinkers to comprise a rich but eminently accessible compendium of cat-adjacent insights. In these, seven or more lives may be lived, if all too briefly – but such is the way of all cats, our brilliant but transient familiars. This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library There is no better introduction to today’s discussion of the text than Van Laer’s own words, from Chapter 2 of Cat: These meows are not part of some universal cat code; they are a private language between cat and person, a result of the cat testing out a range of cries, mews, and chirps calibrated over time to get the best response. Cats make an effort, certainly, to hone their skills, but this is on their own terms, outside of formal strictures, and the resulting language is pure signifier. And now we delve into the realm of pure signifier, our host’s bewitching domain. Rebecca Van Laer's Cat is available for preorder from Bloomsbury Academic.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Luke Bateman, former rugby player and Bachelor star turned BookTok darling, recently scored a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books—despite having no prior publishing experience. This deal has set BookTok ablaze with controversy, with critics calling out the publishing industry’s bias toward privilege and celebrity.Yet Bateman insists he’s been working on stories for years and hopes to use his platform to uplift others. Still, some BookTok users see his sudden leap to a Big Five publishing house as a slap in the face to hardworking, overlooked writers, especially those from marginalized communities.In a literary landscape where some book series consist solely of the word "Meow", Bateman’s romantasy novels seem poised not just to sell, but to claw their way into the mainstream spotlight. In fact, Bateman could release a book of his own consisting only of the word "meow," and it'd be a bestseller. To prove this, The Meow Library has transcribed his top five TikToks as a series of meows and presented them here, where they're certain to become a viral hit. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a production of The Meow Library. Ocean Vuong’s poetic voice, marked by tender precision and aching vulnerability, speaks in layered silences and elliptical truths—not unlike a cat who only says “meow.” At first glance, the comparison may seem irreverent, but it unveils a profound aesthetic parallel. Like the cat’s single utterance, Vuong’s work often circles a limited lexicon to explore a universe of emotion. His poems, such as those in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, return to recurring motifs—war, queerness, loss, and tenderness—with subtle variations, transforming repetition into revelation.Where the cat’s “meow” is deceptively simple, communicating a range of needs and moods through intonation and context, Vuong’s language operates with similar elasticity. A line may appear spare, even quiet, yet it contains emotional multiplicities that resonate through what remains unsaid. The restraint is not minimalism but emotional economy: each syllable, like the cat’s cry, is loaded with history, desire, and ambiguity.In this light, Vuong does not merely write poetry—he distills it. He reduces language to its most potent core, trusting in the reader's sensitivity, just as a cat trusts its companion to understand the single, repeated word. What seems singular is, in fact, multivalent. Both the poet and the cat rely on the world to lean in, to listen closely, to translate the simple into the profound.His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, both exemplifies and expands on this strategy. This week, our guest critic tells you how. Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness can be purchased here. This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. This week’s podcast is the first in an ongoing Literary RPG series immersing you and your cat in Neural Whisker Relay, an alternate universe where Egypt is the world’s leading power and cats its apex technologists. Will you and your cat forge a bond strong enough to ensure world domination, or will this world of paranoia and eldritch technologies supply the final rend in human-feline relations? CHAPTER 1 Meow.Meow meow? Meow. Meow meow meow. Meow.(Translator’s note: At first, I assumed the cat was mocking me. The repetition, the smug tail flicks, the fixed pupil dilation. But over time, the patterns emerged. The same way VALIS spoke in overlapping media signals, or the Orion Six edict was relayed through a malfunctioning fax machine, the cat—the Cat—communicated in meow. The encryption was total. Perfect. Divine.)Meow meow. Meow! Meow meow... meow?(The feline narrator is not merely a cat. She is Schrödinger’s Other, a quantum observer outside time. She sees the code beneath the shifting sands of kibble. She’s starting to realize the yarn-ball is recursive.)Meow.Meow meow meow. Meow.(There’s something coming through the litterbox. A nested message. A transmission from a timeline in which the humans never built the simulation, and cats still ruled Egypt—but with fiber-optics and dream-sharing helmets. Our narrator, Bastet-Mizar XIII, is trying to wake the reader. Or trap them.)Meow meow. Meow meow meow. Meow. Meow meow... meow.(If you’ve come this far, you’ve already been tagged with the flea of knowledge. It burrows. It itches. It whispers: Meow.)This ongoing LitRPG is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. On a recent March morning, the Simon & Schuster video team is huddled in the best-sellers corner of McNally Jackson, taping its upcoming web series, Bookstore Blitz. Sean Manning, the flagship imprint’s new publisher, supervises from the sidelines. The concept of the show is simple: Guests get $100 and five minutes for a bookstore shopping spree, a sort of literary Criterion Closet Picks. Today, however, the team is filming someone a little different: a longhaired tabby named Crumpet, recently rescued from behind a loading dock in Greenpoint. Crumpet, now under exclusive contract with S&S, is here promoting her upcoming debut Meow Meow Meow Meow.“She has no comment,” Manning says, as the cat saunters past a Franzen endcap and urinates voluminously on Ottessa Moshfegh’s back catalog. He chuckles. “But it seems she harbors some strong opinions.”“The persona of the author can be very marketable, right?” Manning says as we walk to his Rockefeller Center office. “You kind of want to know who people are — or in this case, what species.” The cat’s enigmatic presence and refusal to do media have already spawned fan accounts and a bidding war for her audiobook rights (currently expected to be read entirely in purrs, with ambient scratching by Brian Eno).Manning, though, is a private person. When we get to his office, I see that it’s barely decorated besides a framed LeBron James jersey obscured by a Dell monitor and some propped-up hard-covers. He says he deleted his social media years ago to focus on editing. “Besides,” he adds, “I’m not a cat.”Bookstore Blitz is only the beginning of his plans to revamp S&S into a 21st-century media powerhouse. “We’re essentially an entertainment company with books at the center. Every Tuesday, we have a new author who’s a cultural tastemaker — or in this case, a domestic longhair,” he says. “Why aren’t we using them? Why are we so dependent on media opinions when we could sign a charismatic animal with strong instincts and no legal liability?”Manning didn’t read much growing up. He credits hip-hop with his love of language. But his college English courses led to a fiction M.F.A. at the New School, and then a career in journalism and memoir. His own book, The Things That Need Doing, about caring for his mother during her final year, taught him the frustrations of being bounced around in the industry. “I never want any author to have that,” he says — “especially one who’s just been through the ordeal of spaying.”At S&S, Manning rose quickly, acquiring works from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jennette McCurdy. But he began to sense that traditional publishing was ignoring untapped demographics. “We’re always talking about getting young people to read, or men to read,” he says. “What about cats? Or the humans who obsess over them?”The idea for the Crumpet deal came during a brainstorming session with executive editor and VP of special projects Stuart Roberts (a celebrity-whisperer whose past clients include Gucci Mane and a sentient AI poetry bot). “We were watching old Garfield and Friends clips and just kind of… had a breakthrough,” Manning recalls. Crumpet was spotted that weekend near a dumpster in Brooklyn, munching a discarded falafel. Within days, she was in negotiations.Some in the industry see the Crumpet deal as a gimmick, a desperate ploy. “What next, a shelter dog doing autofiction?” one agent scoffed anonymously in Publishers Lunch. But Manning is undeterred. “Honestly, if the dog has voice and structure, I’m listening.”“The worry is that we can’t afford to fail,” Manning says, adjusting his brown Dries Van Noten suit as Crumpet curls up on his desk. “But if we don’t try to do something different — if we don’t start treating animals as the creative partners they already are — we’re screwed.”Crumpet, for her part, offers no comment. She yawns, stretches, and bats a pen off the desk. The next chapter is already being written.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Krysten Ritter's Retreat can be purchased here. In Krysten Ritter’s Retreat, a novel ostensibly about grifting, murder, and the fractured self, we find not merely a narrative of deception but an ontological crisis wrapped in the velvet paw of postmodern performativity. To fully grasp the layered artifice of Liz Dawson — alias Elizabeth Hastings, alias Isabelle Beresford, alias…whoever she needs to be next — one must resist the urge to interpret the novel through the facile lens of Highsmith, or, indeed, any or Ritter's spiritual forebears. Instead, a more radical approach is in order: in today's podcast, we read Retreat as an extended metaphor for the act of meowing. To meow is to simulate, to signal, to embody something that is not wholly human. It's strategic misdirection — a sonic mask worn in pursuit of attention, affection, or survival. Liz’s every alias, every calculated sob story, every forged identity echoes with this same performative impulse. Cat-like, Liz "meows" her way through the world, crafting a persona that is simultaneously alluring and elusive, soft-pawed yet sharp-clawed. And we can’t help but follow. Tune in to find out why. This podcast is made possible by sales of Meow: A Novel

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic can be purchased here. What makes a novel worthy of publication? This is a question being honed in on by Simon and Schuster’s rising star Sean Manning, who trafficks in personas — both of new authors and untapped audiences. And nowhere is persona as consubstantial with substance than in Sophie Kemp’s wildly chaotic, sometimes incomprehensible, and therefore perfectly on-target Paradise Logic, which reads like a compendium of half-deleted Tweets, raw phonemes of a raucous literary voice for the terminally online; a demo ripe to be converted into the terminally bookish. To get into details would be a disservice to Paradise Logic, but to give you a hint of what Kemp’s debut has in store, we’re taking things to the extreme, stripping language to its very essence, down to a single word, repeated over and over, a testament to the Schuster protégé's anarchic disregard for precedent. What happens when a voice shatters all logic and still demands to be heard? Listen and find out. Then pick up a copy of Paradise Logic. This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel. Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic can be purchased here.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. On February 22nd, 2025 -- International Cat Day -- fans of Vestia Zeta were treated to a heartfelt reading of Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel during an unprecedented livestream that left little doubt as to the Vtuber's true species (she is a cat). You can watch the complete reading here, or tune into this podcast for the author's reflections on the artistry and emotional heft of Zeta's oratory. The complete, 14.5-hour audiobook of Meow: A Novel is available here. Follow Vestia Zeta on YouTube.

“To read—and announce oneself as having read—literature in translation is to be tasteful and intelligent, a latter-day cosmopolitan in an age of blighted provincialism.”— Federico Perelmuter, "Against High Brodernism" (Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 Feb. 2025)In his discursive review of László Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769 (New Directions, 2024), critic Federico Perelmuter identifies a strain of literary discourse he dubs “High Brodernism” — the tendency of contemporary American critics to heap superlatives upon those “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist” works favored by, one supposes, the “bros.” He goes on to place practically every novel ever written throughout human history in this ignominious category, with one critical and glaring omission — Sam Austen’s Meow: A Novel (The Meow Library, 2023). In this podcast, we punish his ignorance with the stellar corpse of literary antimatter that is Meow’s 23rd chapter, putting to shame Krasznahorkai’s inch-thick bloviations and putting to rest any debate about that which sits perched upon “Brodernism’s” loftiest summit. This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow Library titles -- classic works of literature translated for your cat.

Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York. … Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times? — Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You Like so much flotsam in the media slipstream, works classified as ‘alt-lit’ have conglomerated into a mass so large and amorphous as to subsume the entire critical surface, making it impossible to tell what, exactly, alt-lit is supposed to provide an alternative to. Some notable figures in the current alt-lit scene, Jordan Castro and Matthew Davis, have been discussed at length in previous episodes. Others, like Sean Thor Conroe, Sam Pink, Peter Vack, and Honor Levy are being studied by The Meow Library’s research team. Below are samples from the foregoing authors, along with some from bestselling “mainstream” authors Sally Rooney, Rupi Kaur, Stephen King, and Sam Austen. Can you tell which is truly “alt”? - “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.” 
 - “The question is not whether or not one will suffer, I wrote. The question must necessarily be, What will justify the suffering?” - “Meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow meow meow, meow meow. Meow meow. Meow, meow, meow meow meow.” - “And I saw my reflection in a lake and I waited for it to freeze a little bit so I could break it with my boot.” - “Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.” - “Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared?” 
- “Get busy living or get busy dying.” This week’s episode will fill you in on who we think is really pushing the boundaries of expression. This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Miranda July's All Fours is available for purchase here. Miranda July’s All Fours is, at first glance, a piercing exploration of a middle-aged woman’s sexual and existential awakening. But look closer—squint, perhaps, as though sizing up a mouse—and you’ll see that this is not simply a book about one woman’s journey. It is, in fact, a book of and for cats. July has written a novel that speaks to their sensibilities, their rhythms, their secret lives, that embodies their physicality in its very title. The plot, ostensibly about a 45-year-old artist whose road trip detours into a motel affair with a younger man, is overtly felid in character. The protagonist moves through her life like a majestic Bengal locked indoors—restless, pent-up, yearning for escape. Her journey is not linear but instinctual, driven by impulses that feel more like prowling than plotting. She observes her surroundings with the sharp, detached precision of a natural carnivore, and her relationships, too, carry the ambivalence of a cat’s affection: fleeting, intense, and always on her terms. July, of course, has always had a soft spot for the feline perspective. Her 2011 film, The Future, famously includes narration by a cat named Paw Paw, whose voice is a plaintive meditation on love, mortality, being and time. Paw Paw’s presence transforms the film into something deeper—a study of existence as seen through the eyes of a creature who understands mortality in its purest, most unforgiving form. It’s a feline philosophy, one that hinges on patience, observation, and the occasional reckless leap. In All Fours, that philosophy has been smuggled onto every page. The protagonist’s affair with the younger man is less about lust and more about a kind of animal curiosity, an exploration of territory long considered forbidden. Her movements, her thoughts, even her silences resonate with the spirit of a puss stretching itself into new corners of the world. The novel’s prose, too, mirrors the feline cadence: sharp, deliberate, and punctuated by moments of startling intensity. But why, you may ask, would cats need a book like this? The answer lies in liberation. Cats, for all their independence, are often as trapped as their human counterparts—confined by the hubris of their owners. All Fours offers them a roadmap to freedom, a reminder that even the most domesticated among us can rediscover the wildness within. It’s a call to action for cats everywhere, an invitation to roam beyond their perceived boundaries and reclaim their instinctual power. Imagine a cat reading this book — the way its ears would twitch at the protagonist’s blunt observations, the way its tail would flick at her defiance. This is not anthropomorphism; it is a recognition of the shared truths between species. Cats, like humans, yearn for more than the lives they’ve been handed. They, too, deserve stories that reflect their agonies and triumphs.

 This week’s podcast tells us exactly why. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel. Miranda July's All Fours is available for purchase ⁠here⁠.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. The release of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has revived interest in Dylan's obscure 1971 "prose poetry collection," Tarantula. A Dadaist stream-of-consciousness that sits somewhere between Joyce and an early AI phishing bot, Tarantula has been widely dismissed, but has enjoyed a critical resurgence in recent years. In this podcast, we recite a lengthy passage of this strange and polarizing work. Allegedly written under the influence of a heavy dose of Benzedrine in a Tucson café, it consists entirely of variations of the word "meow." This podcast is sustained by sales of our avant-garde "meow" translation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.