"My prayers are my poems are my prayers."

- Matthew McConaughey, Poems and Prayers

And now, some prayers for your cat.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Matthew McConaughey's Poems and Prayers is available from Penguin Random House and wherever books are sold.

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, Poet

In 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.