MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

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.

Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old Swiss wunderkind whose debut novel, Lázár, was just released in English, has been compared to every author under the sun, from Márquez to Mann. Does his output really measure up, or are Biedermann's publicists just banking on American readers not knowing who Thomas Mann is? Find out in this week's podcast, featuring a spirited debate between the editors of The Meow Library.
The English translation of Lázár is available through Simon and Schuster.
This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel, which has been favorably compared to Ulysses.

“People get huffy about suicide (selfish to do it, help should be sought, seeking help is called threatning suicide); it’s true that it causes distress, so one tries to avoid it. But the best way is to avoid being driven to the edge in the first place. If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that.”
— Helen DeWitt, on dealing with Windham-Campbell publicity logistics 
Helen DeWitt’s decision to avoid the trappings of modernity that come with being a literary grantee have cost her the $175,000 Windham-Campbell prize. The upside? No irritating Zoom calls, podcasts, or social posts—the shunned DeWitt gets to focus writing. The downside? None. Do you know what $175,000 looks like after taxes? If you’re listening to a literary podcast, probably not. If you’re listening to this literary podcast, there’s truly no helping you. But since you’re here, we’ll present 30 straight minutes of a guy saying “meow”—what the average Zoom call must sound like to one in possession of DeWitt’s rare and noble sensitivities. Which are, by the way, worth considerably more than the rural dentist’s salary the literary world offers as the price of one’s soul. 
To hear Helen DeWitt’s side of the Windham-Campbell story, visit her Blogspot page. 
This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel, the most irritating book on the planet.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library.⁠
There is something splendidly deranged in watching a small indie press marshal the full battery of slop-cannons—Twitter astroturfing, merch drops, the whole hypersaturated liturgy of suspect UGC—as if the reissue of an obscure thirty-year-old novel were the next phase of the Marvel Extended Universe. One has to admire Dalkey Archives' bravura, because this ravenous machinery, so indiscriminate it could be made to canonize a book composed entirely of the word “meow,” has here been bent, however clumsily, toward the resurrection of a genuine abyss, a work of such burrowing intelligence and moral night that to hype it like content does not diminish William H. Gass, but confesses, in the language of the age, that he still possesses that old annihilating power. Bravo, Dalkey Archive. As a token of our admiration, we’re presenting our own addition to the William H. Gass Extended Universe: an excerpt from the rerelease of The Tunnel read entirely in cat language. 
The Dalkey edition of The Tunnel can be purchased here.
This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
“Weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having broken their iPhones, creatively recast.” 
- Giles Harvey, “The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2026. 

Ben Lerner has done something almost impossible in Transcription: he has made the novel dangerous again, restored both as argument and apparition, memory and fraud, broken machine and user error. Out of a failed recording, he has built a book so slim it looks, at first glance, like a dare, then unfolds as proof that the form can still be larger than the life it steals from. One begins to suspect that Lerner did not so much write this book as overhear it in another register altogether, that he had perhaps intended, in some purer and more occult phase of ambition, to compose a novel for cats—something all vibration, pause, atmosphere, and mischief—and that what we have received under the title Transcription is the mortal dictation transcript of that more elegant original: a document of influence, mistranslation, and love, in which the novel survives by refusing to be reduced to mere record. This podcast celebrates what could have been, if Lerner surrendered fully to the bestial anarchy purring beneath Transcription’s many-splendored facade. Get ready to break your iPhone.

This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.
Ben Lerner's Transcription is available through Macmillan and wherever books are sold.