This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

In the beginning of Big Fiction, there were encyclopedic novels and mega-novels and then maximal novels. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s newest, the 1,232-page Tom’s Crossing, we have the supermax, a term most commonly used to describe huge prisons with no escape, no variety of existence, and few relations with the outside world. Prison critics call supermax facilities, with their frequent solitary confinement, excessively inhumane.

- Tom LeClair, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Zoroastrian conception of time, whether lineal or spiral, gave value to the present unrepeatable moment and endowed every act of humanity in history with ultimate meaning. More importantly, it gave hope for the future of the final defeat of the forces are darkness and the Renovation of the world in which we live.

- Susan Manek, Time and the Containment of Evil in Zoroastrianism

"Too long. DNF."

- Anonymous Goodreads review of Tom's Crossing

The era of the social media scroll has irreversibly fractured lineal time, redistributing human focus across an immense, depthless breadth of atemporal data. Books of substance--bound quanta of time--may be the only means by which we can regain our attention spans and apprehend the fullness of human experience. As Zoroastrian scholar Susan Manek points out, "Zoroastrianism posits two types of time. The first is time without bounds. Then there is time-within-bounds (lineal time) designed to contain the forces of evil. The purpose then of both time and physical creation is the containment and ultimate defeat of evil."

The whole art of printed narrative fiction recapitulates the Zoroastrian creation myth, in which Ahura Mazda binds Ahriman's destructive potential in the substance of Time, contriving, in the process, an entire material realm as a counterweight to Ahriman's wickedness.

In scroll-world, any book daring to exceed a certain length is castigated as a Matterhorn of ego, avalanched by critics' seismic invective and maelstroms of neologism (see Federico Perelmuter's Against High Brodernism and Tom LeClair's Enuf is Enuf; sustained assaults against Tom's Crossing's putative genre and particular substance, respectively).

About Tom's Crossing: it may be the last bastion against algorithmic brainrot like Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel, which, in this week's podcast, is deployed as the Ahrimanic twin of Danielewski's noble offering. As for the book itself: just read it. The alternative is what you're about to hear.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut effort, Meow: A Novel.

Mark Z. Danielewski's Tom's Crossing is available in hardcover through Penguin Random House.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Zanche is abashed having read (almost) the entirety of "War and Peace" not realizing that Natasha, Anatole, Pierre, & Boris are human beings & not cats; with just a few pages of the epilogue to go, she wonders if she should reread with a clearer understanding of the characters?

- Tweet by Joyce Carol Oates, 9/14/24 at 11:40 AM EST

Since at least March 20th, 2020, literary icon Joyce Carol Oates' cat, Zanche, has been struggling her way through War and Peace; taking naps every five pages, never quite finishing, dismayed by sparseness of Tolstoy's feline-forward content. As of September 2024, Zanche still has not completed the epilogue. To aid her, The Meow Library has narrated the first ten pages of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (For Your Cat), a painstaking, 762-page translation of the original Russian into Zanche's native tongue. Today's podcast is comprised of this narration, with a brief introduction by the author. A hard copy of the book will be presented to Zanche with Oates' permission.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel.

Joyce Carol Oates' latest short-form writing is available on Substack. Her award-winning novels, short stories, and nonfiction works are available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

“This isn’t exactly ideal, where he wants to make Gracie Mansion a home for the cats. Gracie Mansion is the magnificent home of Fiorello La Guardia and the great mayors, [like] Rudy Giuliani."

- Donald Trump, in response to Curtis Sliwa's NYC Republican mayoral bid

This morning, Curtis Sliwa's six cats issued an extensive typewritten statement pushing back against what they call Trump's "presumptuous" and "ill-considered" remarks about their suitability for NYC's highest office. While it's not our policy to comment on politics, we feel this is among the most compelling clowder manifestos to cross our desks in a long time, and publish it here in full for your consideration.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut publication, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library⁠.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian author ⁠László Krasznahorkai⁠, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art," the Swiss Academy announced in a press release this morning.

To further reaffirm the power of art, we expound on the implications of Krasznahorkai's Nobel win in a language even more impenetrable than Hungarian.

This podcast is sustained by sales of the equally visionary ⁠Meow: A Novel⁠.

"My prayers are my poems are my prayers."

- Matthew McConaughey, Poems and Prayers

And now, some prayers for your cat.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Matthew McConaughey's Poems and Prayers is available from Penguin Random House and wherever books are sold.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Max Lawton’s translation of Schattenfroh represents not merely a feat of linguistic dexterity, but an act of transubstantiation: he renders into English a text whose very atmosphere seems to resist Anglophone sensibilities, and does so with an elegance that preserves both its rigor and its strange vitality. His choices are never pedantic, never ornamental for their own sake; rather, they reveal the deep rhythms of the original prose as though the English version had always been latent in the original. In homage to Lawton's peerless achievement, the Meow Library makes this humble offering, derived from the first 11 pages of Schattenfroh in the original.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut translation, Meow: A Novel.

Max Lawton's brilliant rendition of Schattenfroh is available now from Deep Vellum.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

In this week's podcast, Archimedes, the sole feline presence in R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, accuses the author of having cut many of his scenes in response to "anti-feline sentiment" at the HarperCollins office. "One notices an unusual dearth of cats for a 560-page magical-realist novel," he begins. "This is in response to the disappearance of Julius, Harper-Collins' office canary. A disappearance I had nothing to do with. My truncated role in the book is an act of unalloyed anti-pss-pss-pss-emitism." The Meow Library staff feels Archimedes makes a compelling point, and are proud to give him this platform. Listen and judge for yourself.

This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel--345 pages of "meow," and only "meow," that teaches your cat to read.

R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is available wherever books are sold.

“Words are parasites of reality, which have become so engorged with reality’s blood so as to seem, to that ugly French nothing-master’—he grinned—‘like the only real thing, but they are nothing more than a mirage.”

— Jordan Castro, Muscle Man

Jordan Castro’s efforts toward an “embodied literature” continue in his sophomore novel, Muscle Man, a claustrophobic, mortifying, and bizarrely liberating assault on subject and subjectivity seen through the eyes of a fitness-obsessed academic, Harold, whose desire to build himself up in the gym serves as an alibi for his all-encompassing drive towards annihilation—of his inner monologue, of the cloistered space/time it references, and of interiority’s parasitic, omnipresent vehicle: language itself. As Harold undertakes a series of mundane but consuming tasks, culminating with a gym session in which Body and Mind fuse into a transcendent unity, we see him extricated from a labyrinth of neuroses to enter a state of Bataillian negation, equidistant to cosmic horror and Divinity. In this week’s podcast, we read an excerpt from Muscle Man, keenly attuned to Harold’s—and perhaps Castro’s—self-effacing project(s).

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. 


Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man is available for purchase through Penguin Random House.