MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . "The mind of the cat is the essence of terror." -- Hasan-i Sabbah (c. 1050-1124), founder of the Order of Assassins Alleged United Healthcare shooter Luigi Mangione's Goodreads account has recently been made public, bringing to light a disturbing reading history that includes the works of many controversial authors, most notable of whom is Ted K...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . On December 7th, 2024, New York Times contributor David J. Morris published a controversial essay entitled " The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone ." In today's podcast, our editor issues his rebuttal, bringing to light an unsung voice in the American literary sphere, one which transcends well-trod gender binaries and raises a...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Tolstoy enthusiast, Oxford guest lecturer, and cat fancier Mia Khalifa recently made the following comment regarding the state of the publishing industry: At best: it becomes trendy to read and people inadvertently also *learn*. At worst: morons buy books to showcase as a status symbol, inadvertently supporting publishers, writers, and print med...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Han Kang's The Vegetarian can be purchased here . The basis of Nobel laureate Han Kang's  The Vegetarian  is a line by Korean poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants." But some, like today's interviewee, believe that humans should be cats. A Meow Library translator has taken exception to Han Kang being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Sally Rooney's Intermezzo is available here . Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status and power that are clearly fatal to thei...

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library⁠ . Matthew Davis's ⁠ Let Me Try Again ⁠ can be purchased ⁠here⁠ . Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is a hilarious, deeply human look Gen Z's calamitous superego. It opens on a suicidal fantasy, quickly giving way to a dense and dizzying edifice of self-recrimination — centered, in true Zoomer fashion, on the singular, cosmic theme of...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Caroline Calloway's Scammer can be purchased here . Known as the original social media provocateur, Caroline Calloway has spun a staggering media empire from her controversial Instagram presence. Praised and reviled in equal measure, her long-awaited Scammer belongs to the emerging canon of the "Paper Internet" -- reifications of I...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Gabi Abrão's Notes on Shapeshifting can be purchased here . In a meditation class in high school, our teacher told us to pick our place. This teacher, who did past life regression on dogs and had created a secret holistic elective under the guise of what she told her superiors would be a course on "the history of alternative medicine,&q...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel Today's podcast covers Stranger Things actress-turned-literary wunderkind Millie Bobby Brown's breathtakingly ghostwritten Nineteen Steps , which is being unfairly panned as an exploitative, juvenile cash-in. Find out why it's anything but in this eloquent, 3000-word apologia, ghostwritten by my cat. This podcast is a...

This exclusive interview is a presentation of The Meow Library . “ . . .but in any case the selfimmolatory tendencies of cats does seem to be a known factor in the feline equation. Noted in the writings of Asclepius, among others of the ancients. Jesus, said Seals. It would seem to contradict Unamuno, though. Right, Squire? His dictum that cats reason more than they weep? Of course, their very exis...

This podcast is sponsored by Sam Austen's Meow Library. On May 1st, the Writers Guild of America commenced a strike, effecting an industry-wide suspension of film and television production. With the entertainment industry already in crisis, this strike speaks to the urgency of the matter at hand -- namely, the rights of individual authors in a fast-evolving media landscape where concepts such...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library .  Today, we present your cat with selections from Norman Mailer's "Truth and Being: Nothing and Time," first collected in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967). Many consider this to be his finest (e)sc(h)atological work.  An English-language transcript follows: [It] was left for me to return to the rootless disordered mind of o...

This podcast is a production of The Meow Library .  Last week, Puffin, an imprint of Penguin Books, announced the release of ‘updated’ editions of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s stories, featuring a slew of questionable alterations to the original text, ostensibly attuned to modern sensibilities, but baffling - if not downright insulting - to casual readers and hardcore Dahl fans alike.  Even mor...

" Against the Written Word is the most important, most revolutionary book produced since the advent of the printing press; the book that will liberate readers from reading, writers from writing, and booksellers from peddling their despicable wares." - Ian F. Svenonius , Press Kit, Against the Written Word "We can say nothing about nothing. This is why the number of books can't be limited. All the...

I walked a thousand steps down from God-Warrior to human, verging on animalistic feline… - M.I.A., OHMNI9, Chapter 7 With literacy on the outs and audiobook usage at an all-time high, artist, musician, and activist M.I.A. has chosen the ideal delivery vector for her psychedelic cosmogony OHMNI9 , whose kaleidoscopic, Blake-adjacent mythos tackles the present with all the force of prophecy. Here, c...

In this episode, we read a passage from Prof. Sam Austen's feline-language translation of Ted Kaczynski's infamous manifesto, which has reportedly earned him a lifetime ban from Golden State Medical University, where he formerly chaired the Feline Behavioral Sciences department. A brief interview with Mr. Austen follows.  UPDATE 06/20/23 - Amazon has shut down production of The Unabomber M...

Claims about Prince Harry’s use of a “Meow” audiobook to lull a Sussex prostitute into a state of autoerotic trance have spread like wildfire in the weeks leading up to the release of his white-hot memoir, Spare , where they, along with a litany of other feline-tinged indiscretions, are allegedly recounted in detail.  In this episode, Oxford linguist Sam Austen plays a 20-minute segment of “Meow:...

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term "Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN),” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Among these insiders, those who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of their privileged status or see their ideas subjected to li...

“Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.” - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 12 “The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that t...

“That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which really is.” - Zoë Tamerlis Lund, quoted by Annie Hamilton “All writing is garbage.” - Antonin Artaud By not writing a novel, NYC-based actress Annie Hamilton has written the best and only novel of the 21st century. Visit her Instagram, @soimwritinganovel , to read this novel. This week’s podcast is not a passage from her novel,...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) . Our relationship with cats mirrors that of the primal unconscious with domestic order: it serves as persistent reminder of the ‘Other’, by whose exclusion we define our own humanity. This is how Michel Foucault – who named his own cat ‘Insanity’ – understood the construction of madness in society. Cats, in this sense,...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .  " David Foster Wallace noticed early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite e...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) . Cat lovers: before continuing, please consider supporting Feline Lifeline , Angela Campbell's nonprofit stray-cat rescue. On the Scent and other books in Angela Campbell's Psychic Detective series can be found on Amazon . According to psychologist Sam Vaknin, “because our civilization resembles a jungle more a...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) . In this episode, we celebrate Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s devotion to animal welfare; namely, his support of The Pixie Project , a Portland-based animal rescue facing an unprecedented inflow of “pandemic remorse” animals. Enthusiastically adopted during COVID lockdowns, rescue pets are now being resheltered in...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library . Episode 13: Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards, and the Gen-X Paracosm In today’s episode, we read a preview of Bret Easton Ellis’s upcoming The Shards (available for pre-order here ), followed by a discussion with psychologist Sam Austen about the rise of the ‘Gen-X Paracosm’ – the all-pervasive 1980s nostalgia that serves as a projective outlet for...