This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

The prestigious Booker Prize has announced its longlist, and all three of our listeners who actually follow UK literary prizes are eagerly awaiting the outcome. To make the wait more bearable, we’ve assigned a stray cat to each of the thirteen longlisters* and will have them battle each other publicly the day before the Booker’s official winner is announced. Choose your fighter, study its stats, and place your bets in the comment section.

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis A literary mystery about art, memory, and obsession as a woman searches for meaning in enigmatic objects.

Associated Stray: The Curator • Weight: 12.4 lb (Super Middleweight) • Record: 27 museum mice • 0 broken vases • 3 laser pointers defeated • Reach: 15” whisker span • Signature Move: The Velvet Glare

Switzy by Emma Cline An aging man’s grip on reality unravels as memory, identity, and performance begin to blur.

Associated Stray: Old Whiskers • Weight: 10.1 lb (Welterweight) • Record: 19 naps • 8 windowsills defended • Undefeated against vacuum cleaners • Reach: 14” whisker span • Signature Move: The Forgetful Feint

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna GoodmanA surreal fable following a woman searching for freedom and belonging through an uncanny landscape.

Associated Stray: The Wanderer • Weight: 8.8 lb (Lightweight) • Record: 114 fences crossed • 0 maps consulted • Reach: 13” whisker span • Signature Move: The Moonlit Escape

The End of Everything by M. John HarrisonA philosophical post-apocalyptic novel contemplating what remains after civilization quietly collapses.

Associated Stray: Ashes • Weight: 15.0 lb (Heavyweight) • Record: 9 apocalypses survived • 8½ lives remaining • Reach: 18” whisker span • Signature Move: The Last Hiss

The Disappearers by Marlon JamesSet largely in 1980s Jamaica, it explores violence, queerness, and identity through lives shaped by fear and disappearance.

Associated Stray: Ghost Paw • Weight: 11.7 lb (Middleweight) • Record: 41 stealth victories • Never seen entering the ring • Reach: Impossible to measure • Signature Move: The Vanishing Pounce

Black Bag by Luke KennardA darkly comic satire of modern life where absurd situations expose contemporary anxieties.

Associated Stray: Chaos Mittens • Weight: 13.2 lb (Cruiserweight) • Record: 56 cardboard boxes destroyed • 17 curtains retired • Reach: 16” whisker span • Signature Move: The Existential Zoomies

The Renovation by Kenan OrhanA family’s building project uncovers buried memories, political tensions, and ghosts from the past.

Associated Stray: Contractor Claws • Weight: 13.6 lb (Light Heavyweight) • Record: 84 drywall ambushes • 1 undefeated Roomba • Reach: 16½” whisker span • Signature Move: The Demolition Derby

May We Feed the King by Rebecca PerryAn unsettling speculative novel imagining a society where ritual, appetite, and power become inseparable.

Associated Stray: The Poobah • Weight: 16.2 lb (Heavyweight Champion) • Record: 999 treats consumed • 0 shared willingly • Reach: 18” whisker span • Signature Move: The Royal Chomp

The Vivisectors by Missouri WilliamsA gothic speculative novel blending dark humor and body horror to explore ambition, science, and the remaking of life.

Associated Stray: Dr. Clawsworth • Weight: 13.1 lb (Cruiserweight) • Record: 12 laboratory break-ins • 0 ethics committee approvals • Reach: 16” whisker span • Signature Move: The Mad Scientist Mauling

*Some contestants had to be trimmed for length. Refer to the episode for full contestant list.

This week’s podcast enumerates the Meow Library’s Booker Prize Battle Royale’s official rules in the contestants’ native language.

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

Recent X posts are bringing awareness to Anthropic’s secret plan to dismantle millions of rare books in order to scan them into their LLMs. According to tech journalist Ole Lehmann, the process looks something like this:

• Since access to physical books can’t be logged by copyright holders, Anthropic has decided to purchase millions of used books and scan them into their private servers to create a high-quality knowledge base for its LLMs—without paying a penny in royalties or licensing fees.

• They needed to work fast without getting caught. They deployed swarms of used-book buyers to snap up millions of titles, many of which were so obscure as to create inventory headaches for book dealers.

• Still, they were able to acquire enough books to mass-scan between 500,000 and 2 million in six months.

• To scan books at this speed, their spines needed to be removed and pages cut down to a size that could be fed en masse into high-speed scanners.

• Once ingested, the original books were considered waste (more accurately, evidence), and discarded.

This practice not only gives Anthropic a de facto monopoly on huge swathes of accumulated human knowledge, but enables them to modify it as they see fit without fear of detection, as there is no longer any master copy to refer back to. Malicious intent aside, the scanning process and digital interpretation of the PDF scans is likely to be rife with errors, effectively building a Tower of Babel atop the smoldering pyre of their latter-day sack of Alexandria.

To his credit, Elon Musk tweets, “I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.” Could this be his unlikely route to becoming the champion of information access that his team’s bizarre mismanagement of X could never let him be?

At The Meow Library, we’re not so sure. But we do have a way to disrupt Anthrophic’s scheme: flooding the market with used Meow Library titles. Big AI’s buyers will think they’re getting their hands on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, War and Peace, The Odyssey, or Wuthering Heights, but will only get hundreds of thousands of “meows.”

Do your part by visiting The Meow Library today—and putting your copies on the secondhand market.

This podcast is sustained by the continued bestselling status of The Meow Library’s Classics Collection.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Pop star and book-club maven Dua Lipa has just announced the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of one hundred books that have been banned, censored, or seriously challenged at some point in their publication cycle. Housed inside Porto’s historic Livraria Lello and organized into four sections—Control, Voice, Memory, and Power—the library is intended as a celebration of literature that has attracted controversy for asking inconvenient questions.

Curators have since confirmed that the most popular section is a last-minute annex designed to accommodate Sam Austen’s Meow Library series, whose principal offense is replacing every word of classic texts with “meow”—a challenge to the anthropocentric view of literacy that was met with momentary ban by human authorities in 2022. The expansion is expected to preserve the library’s mission while allowing for “cross-species ambassadorship.” Not only are ample copies of The Meow Library's oeuvre available for checkout, but the annex will also house Mr. Austen’s manuscripts and discarded works, including a never-before-seen partial translation of Finnegan’s Wake.

In this week’s podcast, we read from this lost work: it’s our way of inviting you to Porto to explore this landmark collection.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our international bestseller, Meow: A Novel.

The Meow Library has secured an exclusive interview with Christopher Nolan's cat, Felicity, who discusses the process by which her owner "re-engineered" Homer's Odyssey for contemporary audiences, and how his understanding of the material was enhanced by a copy of The Meow Library's Odyssey translation.

This podcast is sustained by sales of The Meow Library's Odyssey adaptation.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Twitter user Nabeel S. Qureshi was quick to identify the winner of the 2026 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Competition, Back and Forth, ostensibly by "Kavyata Kay," as largely, if not entirely, AI-generated. The panel of Bazaar judges, which included novelist Ruth Ozeki, are not so quick to cast aspersions, denying, as of this writing, any knowledge of AI involvement. The Meow Library team was unable to get past the story's first line, which is "The tree knew before she did - and it waited."

For the crime of bringing such writing into public view, we sentence the literary establishment to listen to us meow without interruption for over 20 minutes.

This podcast is sustained by sales of the award-winning Meow: A Novel.

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.