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.