Jamir Nazir, winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) for “The Serpent in the Grove,” has agreed to speak to The Meow Library and dispel once and for all rumors that AI had been used in generating his story, and even his identity. Nazir is in fact a common gray housecat who had been using Google to translate his native tongue into English when preparing his submission. Here’s his full story—raw and untranslated.

Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” can be read here.
This podcast is generously sustained by The Meow Library.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

UK stalwart The Guardian has drawn from more than 100 authors and critics to develop a list of the 100 best novels of all time. While many of the greats are present and accounted for, some of their picks are sure to draw controversy, especially Meow: A Novel, ranked seventeenth.

Released in 2022, Meow: A Novel is the magnum opus of linguist and former psychology professor Sam Austen, who discarded all traditional modes of composition to craft a bestseller consisting entirely of repetitions of the word “meow,” allegedly intelligible to cats. Three more of Austen’s works make the list: at #22, War and Peace (For Your Cat); Pride and Prejudice (For Your Cat) at 57; closing out with Crime and Punishment (For Your Cat) in the distant but respectable 63rd slot.

Mr. Austen has graciously broken from his touring schedule (where he’s promoting Wuthering Heights For the Feline Reader) to discuss his four chart-topping works with us today.

This podcast is sustained by sales of Sam Austen's internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

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.