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.

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.”

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Recently, novelist and NYU professor Ocean Vuong sat down with book commentator David Perell to discuss a number of stifling trends in contemporary literature, namely the “taming of the sentence,” which has become increasingly evident as writers begin using AI tools to check their work for clarity. Vuong argues that this enervation of literary style began with the newspaper, eventually finding its way into universities and literary workshops. AI merely reveals the pervasiveness of today’s “merely communicative” approach. Better writing comes, he explains, when authors value intuition over precision.

This podcast demolishes Vuong’s position by presenting an excerpt from the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Or maybe it proves his point. We don’t know. It’s all a vibe, man.

This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

Ocean Vuong’s work can be read and purchased here.