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 their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product,one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.

-- Andrea Long Chu for Vulture

While much has been written in praise of Sally Rooney's frank Millenial realism, its Marxist underpinnings are only beginning to be explored. Theory, as ever, can only be thinly illustrative of the market forces propelling Rooney's work into the academic and popular spotlight. The Meow Library believes that the magnitude of Intermezzo's impact can only be understood through praxis, so our analysis takes the form of thousands of undifferentiated "meows," thereby converting it, like Rooney's subversions-as-Harlequin-Romance, into an eminently viral force with potential to destabilize and transform its very means of propagation: a force as great as Love itself, if not greater.

Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats is supported by sales of Meow: A Novel and other Meow Library titles.

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 much “alt-lit” — a twentysomething breakup. But this time, it’s done with class.

Davis’s dire, uproarious idiom evokes an atmosphere of mortifying regret (the very quiddity of Zoomer being), riding the inexorable crests and valleys of the on-again, off-again “situationship” to Oblivion and back. And somehow, he makes sure you enjoy every second of it.

There exists no better analog to the book's central refrain than the fraught, tenuous, but always rewarding bond between human and cat, so we will now meow at you for 30 minutes, giving you time to think about all you’ve loved and lost, drop the pathos, and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Sales of Meow: A Novel help fund The Meow Library's continuing research into the art and science of meowing.

Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is available through Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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 Internet fame, printed, bound, and re-ingested into cyberspace in the form of "BookTok" content. What is it, exactly, that makes a physical book like Scammer resonate so well with the algorithm? While accusations of uncredited ghostwriting promulgated by her former friend and collaborator, Natalie Beach, have helped propel Scammer to infamy, The Meow Library's team of forensic linguists have detected an unmistakably feline rhythm to the book's opening chapters, leading us to question whether Calloway's cat, Matisse, may have imparted the intrinsic virality of cat-language to Scammer's pages. After nearly a year of analysis, we are presenting the book's first twenty pages in feline translation. Could Scammer's singular tone and self-published success be attributed to an invisible paw? Listen and judge for yourselves.

Closing comments supplied by BBC presenter Emma Millen's cat, Delia.

Meow: A Literary Podcast For Cats is supported by sales of our debut cat-language tome, Meow: A Novel.

Visit Caroline Calloway's Bookstagram here.

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," said to us, "Pick a place to be in. Just sit there and listen. Make room for visits from animals, insects, spirits."

- Gabi Abrão, Notes on Shapeshifting

This is the place to be in. Take a deep breath, and make room for a visit from a cat.

In this week's podcast, The Meow Library has translated passages from Gabi Abrão's bestselling poetry collection into cat language. After noticing that cats seemed inexorably drawn to copies of the book (a phenomenon experimentally verified by Abrão via a Discord post), we solicited field recordings of their vocalizations and assembled them, with the help of a professional narrator, into this 30-minute compendium of feline resonances found within the text.

For more, visit Gabi and The Meow Library on Instagram:

Gabi Abrão: @sighswoon

The Meow Library: @meowliterature

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 presentation of The Meow Library: https://meowlibrary.com

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 existence according to Rilke is wholly hypothetical.

Cats?

Cats.”

-- Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

In the low-hanging twilight, when the horizon was stained with an eerie hue of ashen gray, the splay-legged tabby known as Cormac McCarthy took his final faltering steps. His once agile frame, now burdened by the relentless passage of time, moved with a solemnity of ancient timbers. Shadows danced upon his frail silhouette, elongating the lines of age etched beneath his mange-stricken eyes, gray and pink underskin like the cracked parchments of forgotten manuscripts.

Those sooted emeralds, once fierce and piercing, now glimmered with a dim light, as if struggling to maintain their brilliance against the encroaching darkness. The fire of life within them whispered its last plea, a desperate attempt to hold onto a world that had grown weary and desolate.

Cormac, a creature forged in a realm of solitude and quiet contemplation, traversed the dire sands of his own existence, each step a measured cadence resonating with the weight of countless untold tales and unfulfilled desires. The very air seemed to hang heavy, laden with the mournful sighs of countless souls who had passed before him.

As he made his way to a secluded alcove, sheltered from the merciless winds that whispered their cruel laments, the shrill of absence enfolded him. The rasp of flame-kissed straw and the distant echo of a howling wind played their melancholy symphony, accompanying Cormac on his final pilgrimage.

In that sacred space, amidst the fading light, Cormac lay his weary body upon the cool earth. The world around him hushed, as if nature herself held her breath in reverence for this solemn departure. The final rays of the sun caressed his fur, painting him in a gentle golden hue, a testament to the untamed spirit that once roamed these lands.

The silence deepened, the stillness grew, as Cormac's heart, that delicate metronome of life, stuttered and sputtered. His ragged breaths purred their final tale, dissipating into the vast expanse of eternity. And in that quietude, the soul of a nomadic philosopher, a wanderer of realms unseen, was unshackled from its earthly vessel.

The world mourned its loss, though it knew not of the passing. No grand elegy would be written, no chorus of mourners would sing in lament. But in the hearts of those who had known him, who had witnessed the enigmatic dance of his existence, a void was left. A void that could only be filled by the echoes of his meows, the faint whispers of his stories, forever woven into the fabric of time.

Thus, Cormac McCarthy, the feline sage who prowled the alleys of our mortal coil, departed from this realm, transcending the boundaries of flesh and bone. His tale, now complete, would forever linger in the forgotten corners of the human heart, a testament to the enduring power of a single, idiot life.

Cormac McCarthy was my cat, and these are his final words.

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 as syndication and residual payments are all but irrelevant. Worse, with the major studios and streaming networks posting quarter after quarter of dire earnings statements, the replacement of human writers by technologies such as ChatGPT may be imminent as producers struggle to recover their bottom lines.

In this episode, we speak with Hollywood insider Sam Austen, whose use of non-union labor in the creation of several hit media franchises has proven controversial, but difficult to legislate, as he relies entirely upon stray cats to write, act in, and produce his impressive portfolio of series, films, and books. Here, he speculates about a possible future where, after winning legal protection against AI's encroachment on their turf, writers will have to rise up against a far more resilient foe -- the common housecat.

Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel - written entirely by cats - is fast becoming a bestseller, and is available on Amazon.

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 our Twentieth Century to the kiss sub cauda and the Weltanschauung of the Medieval witch. The kiss sub cauda: if I had not come to recognize over the years of my career that nobility of form and aristocracy of manner are the last hope of man, I would not explain that sub cauda means beneath the tail, the hole in the highness of the cat, the place the witch would kiss when out she voyaged to visit the Demon, cats being classified by Medieval logic as the trinity of the Devil shaped into One.

It is characteristic of revolutionaries, passionate lovers, the very ambitious, the greedy, the stingy, and dogs, to fix on what is excreted by others; it is typical of Narcissists, children, nuns, spinsters, misers, bankers, conservative statesmen, dictators, compulsive talkers, bores, and World War I generals accomplished at trench warfare, to be forever sniffing their own. But the intelligent and conservative among you are annoyed already for there is a tendency to my remarks which you detect with unease, you fear I lead the argument into the alp of the high immoral. I do; but perhaps my aim is to rescue morality....

We are drawn to shit because we are imperfect in our uses of the good. If all we eliminated was noxious, hopeless, used-up or never-intended, it would be a pervert or maniac who found the subject attractive. But not all of what we give away is useless.... Each cell in each existence labors like all life to make the most of what it is or can be, each cell is different, perhaps even so different as one of us from another. So perhaps we do not digest all that is good for us....

The dung of the brave is filled with riches for the fearful: precisely those subtleties, reservations, and cautions the courageous dislike are grace and wit for the coward; the offal of the fool has sweets to accelerate a genius -- a dull mind must reject those goods for fear the head would hemorrhage from unexpected and indisposbale enthusiasms....

But if excrement is the enforced marriage of Tragic Beauty and Filth, why then did God desert it, and leave our hole to the Devil, unless it is because God has hegemony over us only as we create each other. God owns the creation, but the Devil has power over all the waste -- how natural for him to lay siege where the body ends and the weak tragic air begins. Out of the asshole pour the riches of Satan -- these souls of nutrient, these lost cells spurned by the universe of the body they traversed, their being about to be cast into the lower existence of Chance....

Only Chance prospered in the Twentieth Century.... The progression was from man to merde, the Twentieth Century was a rush of all souls to search out shit, to kiss the Devil, to rescue a molecule from the brown of its extinction. For think: we began with the kiss sub cauda, the kiss to the hole of the cat. The cat -- that marriage of grace and cruelty, self-centered, alien, alone, what can the cat use in its food of tender cells, compassionate meats, philosophical greens? It cannot -- the drop of the cat is rich in royal and generous affections; one only has to absorb, and one will love with grace.

Bid us farewell, now, with a final kiss sub cauda. And follow us on Twitter.