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

“I want to show, among other things, why this question, the problem of breeding, is in many respects identical to philosophy, or at least identical to political philosophy.”  — Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy  “Dembeck, in a conjectural reconstruction of the history of the Persian cat, suggests that it was Cambyses who brought from Egypt the strain that was later developed into the furry Persian cat. Because of its association with evil, the cat was taboo...

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...

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...

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:...

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.  More troubling on the censorship front is last year’s preemptive cancellation of Alberto Gullaba Jr.’s...

"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 bodies together, all the minds together, and all their output are not worth the least expression...

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 format to contain her psychedelic cosmogony OHMNI9, whose kaleidoscopic, Blake-adjacent mythos tackles the present with all the force of prophecy. Here, civilizations rise and fall; men adopt forms bestial, God-like, and ineffable; and the world's...

In this episode, we read a passage from Prof. Sam Austen's bold new translation of Ted Kaczynski's infamous manifesto, which has 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.  This week's podcast is brought to you by The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) by Theodore J. Kaczynski, translated by Sam Austen. It's available now on Amazon.  Publisher's Summary: “The...

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: A Novel,” his 14.5-hour audio opus, and explains how this, in conjunction with an obscure...

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term “Gated Institutional Narrative,” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Insiders who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of insider status or see their ideas subjected to linguistic processing that renders them compatible with the GIN. This idea was later expanded into that of the Distributed Idea...

“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 this very economy needs.” - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish This podcast is sustained...

“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, which does not exist. Check out Annie Hamilton’s Twitter, @ANNIE_HAM, for the latest on this...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Jack Skelley's Interstellar Theme Park is available here. 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, are vehicles for our projections,...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).  Carrie Soto is Back and other works by Taylor Jenkins Reid are available here.  "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 encouragement, and...

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 and more, it’s not surprising that there is an exponential proliferation of cat ownership.” This fact,...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Support Chuck Palahniuk's charitable work here.  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: those adopted during COVID lockdowns now facing an uncertain future because their owners want to “travel more.” For more on how you can...

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards is available for pre-order here. 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 by feline psychologist Sam Austen about the rise of the ‘Gen-X Paracosm’ – the all-pervasive 1980s nostalgia that serves as a projective outlet for the frustrations and...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our book series for cats, The Meow Library. Jerry Saltz's Art is Life is available here. Episode 12: Jerry Saltz: Art Is Life - An Excerpt for Your Cat Released today, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz's signature wit, levity, and insight unfolds as a dizzying panorama of the contemporary art scene in Art is Life. Touching yet informative, Saltz's latest effort is sure to resonate with a wide array of readers -- not least of which is the...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Brad Phillips' Essays and Fictions is available here.  Episode 11: Brad Phillips, Patricia Highsmith, and Clifford Irving Brad Phillips is a Canadian author and fine artist whose recent collection of “Essays and Fictions” (available here) courts with – and immediately undermines – an autobiographical reading, alluding repeatedly to the author’s propensity for half-truths, misdirection, and straight-up grift....

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). To pre-order Caitlin Forst's NDA: An Autofiction Anthology, click here. Episode 10: Caitlin Forst’s NDA, the Primacy of Autofiction, and the Rise of Otherspecies Narratives Today’s conversation turns at first to Caitlin Forst, editor of the upcoming NDA: An Autofiction Anthology and curator of a the NDA Autofiction Reading Series at Stories Books & Café in Los Angeles. She is also a formidable autofictress...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).  To pre-order Allie Rowbottom's Aesthetica, click here. Episode 9: Allie Rowbottom's Aesthetica, Erasure of the Flesh, and the Polymorphic Self Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica (available for preorder here)is a near-future peek into the inevitable: insubstantial and rudderless at 35, the protagonist, a former Instagram influencer, undergoes a dicey elective procedure to erase the years of fillers, lifts, laser and...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 8: Tao Lin’s Mandalas, Repetition Compulsion, and Hofstadter’s Labyrinth Today we discuss Tao Lin’s recently publicized mandala art as an extension of his literary practice. Known for its simple language, circularity, and psychedelic aloofness – biting yet airy, kaleidoscopic yet concise, concrete yet polymorphic, polarizing yet irresistible – Lin's prose and poetry embody, to some, the fullest and most...

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 7: Chelsea Martin: Tell Me I'm an Artist, Simulacra, and False Consciousness In her newly released Tell Me I’m an Artist, Chelsea Martin’s obliquely autobiographical protagonist embarks upon a seemingly absurd project of self-disclosure, embodying the Self as a homebrew remake of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, a film she’s never seen. In so doing, she reifies her own identity -- alternately self-reflexive and...