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MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats
Published by The Meow Library
- Books
- Arts
Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com
Listen on Apple PodcastsPublished by The Meow Library
Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com
Listen on Apple Podcasts29 min
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . The prestigious Booker Prize has announced its longlist , and all three of our listeners who actually follow UK literary prizes are eagerly awaiting the outcome. To make the wait more bearable, we’ve assigned a stray cat to each of the thirteen longlisters* and will have them battle each other publicly the day before the Booker’s official winner is announced. Choose your fighter, study its stats, and place your bets in the comment section. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis A literary mystery about art, memory, and obsession as a woman searches for meaning in enigmatic objects. Associated Stray: The Curator • Weight: 12.4 lb (Super Middleweight) • Record: 27 museum mice • 0 broken vases • 3 laser pointers defeated • Reach: 15” whisker span • Signature Move: The Velvet Glare Switzy by Emma Cline An aging man’s grip on reality unravels as memory, identity, and performance begin to blur. Associated Stray: Old Whiskers • Weight: 10.1 lb (Welterweight) • Record: 19 naps • 8 windowsills defended • Undefeated against vacuum cleaners • Reach: 14” whisker span • Signature Move: The Forgetful Feint Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman A surreal fable following a woman searching for freedom and belonging through an uncanny landscape. Associated Stray: The Wanderer • Weight: 8.8 lb (Lightweight) • Record: 114 fences crossed • 0 maps consulted • Reach: 13” whisker span • Signature Move: The Moonlit Escape The End of Everything by M. John Harrison A philosophical post-apocalyptic novel contemplating what remains after civilization quietly collapses. Associated Stray: Ashes • Weight: 15.0 lb (Heavyweight) • Record: 9 apocalypses survived • 8½ lives remaining • Reach: 18” whisker span • Signature Move: The Last Hiss The Disappearers by Marlon James Set largely in 1980s Jamaica, it explores violence, queerness, and identity through lives shaped by fear and disappearance. Associated Stray: Ghost Paw • Weight: 11.7 lb (Middleweight) • Record: 41 stealth victories • Never seen entering the ring • Reach: Impossible to measure • Signature Move: The Vanishing Pounce Black Bag by Luke Kennard A darkly comic satire of modern life where absurd situations expose contemporary anxieties. Associated Stray: Chaos Mittens • Weight: 13.2 lb (Cruiserweight) • Record: 56 cardboard boxes destroyed • 17 curtains retired • Reach: 16” whisker span • Signature Move: The Existential Zoomies The Renovation by Kenan Orhan A family’s building project uncovers buried memories, political tensions, and ghosts from the past. Associated Stray: Contractor Claws • Weight: 13.6 lb (Light Heavyweight) • Record: 84 drywall ambushes • 1 undefeated Roomba • Reach: 16½” whisker span • Signature Move: The Demolition Derby May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry An unsettling speculative novel imagining a society where ritual, appetite, and power become inseparable. Associated Stray: The Poobah • Weight: 16.2 lb (Heavyweight Champion) • Record: 999 treats consumed • 0 shared willingly • Reach: 18” whisker span • Signature Move: The Royal Chomp The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams A gothic speculative novel blending dark humor and body horror to explore ambition, science, and the remaking of life. Associated Stray: Dr. Clawsworth • Weight: 13.1 lb (Cruiserweight) • Record: 12 laboratory break-ins • 0 ethics committee approvals • Reach: 16” whisker span • Signature Move: The Mad Scientist Mauling *Some contestants had to be trimmed for length. Refer to the episode for full contestant list. This week’s podcast enumerates the Meow Library’s Booker Prize Battle Royale’s official rules in the contestants’ native language. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel .
26 min
Recent X posts are bringing awareness to Anthropic’s secret plan to dismantle millions of rare books in order to scan them into their LLMs. According to tech journalist Ole Lehmann, the process looks something like this : Since access to physical books can’t be logged by copyright holders, Anthropic has decided to purchase millions of used books and scan them into their private servers to create a high-quality knowledge base for its LLMs—without paying a penny in royalties or licensing fees. They needed to work fast without getting caught. They deployed swarms of used-book buyers to snap up millions of titles, many of which were so obscure as to create inventory headaches for book dealers. Still, they were able to acquire enough books to mass-scan between 500,000 and 2 million in six months. To scan books at this speed, their spines needed to be removed and pages cut down to a size that could be fed en masse into high-speed scanners. Once ingested, the original books were considered waste (more accurately, evidence), and discarded. This practice not only gives Anthropic a de facto monopoly on huge swathes of accumulated human knowledge, but enables them to modify it as they see fit without fear of detection, as there is no longer any master copy to refer back to. Malicious intent aside, the scanning process and digital interpretation of the PDF scans is likely to be rife with errors, effectively building a Tower of Babel atop the smoldering pyre of their latter-day sack of Alexandria. To his credit, Elon Musk tweets, “I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning .” Could this be his unlikely route to becoming the champion of information access that his team’s bizarre mismanagement of X could never let him be? At The Meow Library, we’re not so sure. But we do have a way to disrupt Anthrophic’s scheme: flooding the market with used Meow Library titles. Big AI’s buyers will think they’re getting their hands on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, War and Peace, The Odyssey, or Wuthering Heights, but will only get hundreds of thousands of “meows.” Do your part by visiting The Meow Library today—and putting your copies on the secondhand market. This podcast is sustained by the continued bestselling status of The Meow Library’s Classics Collection .
27 min
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 .
26 min
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 .
29 min
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 .
29 min
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 .
27 min
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 .
26 min
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 .
29 min
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.
26 min
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 .
27 min
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 .
26 min
“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 .
29 min
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 .
27 min
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.
26 min
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 .
29 min
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.
26 min
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 .
27 min
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 .
26 min
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 .
26 min
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 .