MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

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 writi...

  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. Her...

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...

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...

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’...

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 madh...

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...

“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 Wind...

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 ' bravur...

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, m...

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...

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...

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 repetitio...

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 bourge...

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 eche...

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 &...

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...

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 thi...

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 wro...

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 ha...

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’ Beca...

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 t...

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 Substack Hyperpop sensation Charli XCX has taken to Substack to announce she's eschewing her usual creative process, immersing herself in the wo...

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...

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...