MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

The Meow Library
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Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com

  1. Jul 16

    89. Dua Lipa Opens a Library for Banned Books—and It’s Not Just for Humans

    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.

    89. Dua Lipa Opens a Library for Banned Books—and It’s Not Just for Humans

  2. Jul 13

    88. Adapting The Odyssey: An Interview with Christopher Nolan's Cat

    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.

    88. Adapting The Odyssey: An Interview with Christopher Nolan's Cat

  3. Jun 20

    87. AI Wins Harper's Bazaar's Short Story Competion

    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.

    87. AI Wins Harper's Bazaar's Short Story Competion

  4. May 20

    86. The Granta / Commonwealth Short Story Prize Scandal: Our Exclusive Interview with Winner Jamir Nazir (He’s Not AI)

    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.

    86. The Granta / Commonwealth Short Story Prize Scandal: Our Exclusive Interview with Winner Jamir Nazir (He’s Not AI)

  5. May 18

    85. The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of All Time: The Most Controversial Picks 

    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.

    85. The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of All Time: The Most Controversial Picks 

  6. May 4

    84. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear: Simulation of Simulacra 

    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.

    84. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear: Simulation of Simulacra 

  7. Apr 30

    83. Lena Dunham’s Famesick: Four Shocking Revelations 

    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.

    83. Lena Dunham’s Famesick: Four Shocking Revelations 

  8. Apr 15

    82. The Only Thinkpiece About Lindy West's Adult Braces That Matters

    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.

    82. The Only Thinkpiece About Lindy West's Adult Braces That Matters
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Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com

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