MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

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.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Controversy surrounding the state of American literacy has stirred following Christopher Nolan's announcement of his Odyssey adaptation, with many prominent social media users having⁠ no clue what The Odyssey is⁠. TikToker and Twitch streamer ⁠@hzjoe03⁠ says: The way people are acting around this book is insane. So what if people don’t know what it is? Are people supposed to be aware of every single piece of literature? You understand schools teach different things right? Bet a lot of you haven’t read Macbeth, An Inspector Calls and so on[.] Is The Odyssey really that important? And will this film adaptation help raise awareness of the classics? We asked an American high school student, who proceeded to meow at us for over 30 minutes. At the very least, Homer will appreciate those royalty cheques, however few may come in. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut work, Meow: A Novel.