This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

The University of Chicago’s Humanities Department is poised to become one of the largest and most visible casualties of President Trump’s recent defunding of the NEA, with its language departments particularly imperiled. The departments for comparative literature, Germanic studies, Slavic languages and literatures, and South American languages and civilizations are currently slated for “reorganization,” with questions arising as to whether there’s “no longer [a] need to teach” certain languages, and if “partnerships with corporations or other organizations” could support language instruction at UChicago.

Given the massive impact to humanities education, particularly in the field of literature, already being seen since Trump’s Q2 NEA defunding announcement, The Meow Library would like to propose a solution: convert all existing world literature to the standard “meow” format, in which every word is replaced with one easily-digested phoneme: “meow.” Literature departments will require no human instructors, only a single cat, who can also provide pest-control services and moral support by way of trills, cuddles, and purrs. We estimate that within one calendar year, all University literature departments will not only be solvent, but in fact highly profitable, if the “meow” strategy is applied.

In this episode, our Editor-in-Chief explains his plan to save literacy in great detail.

This podcast—and worldwide literacy—are sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel.

“Consciousness stands in the way of a good life. …the feline mind is one and undivided. Pain is suffered and forgotten, and the joy of life returns.”

– John Gray, Feline Philosophy

Rebecca Van Laer’s Cat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) packs nine lives of feline wisdom into a slim but satisfying volume. One of these lives is serene, domesticated: a diaristic jaunt through the anxieties, hopes, and occluded memories awakened by the many cats in Van Laer’s own life. Another is feral, possessed of incurable zoomies: a kaleidoscopic survey of all things furred and mewling, traversing online memescapes, the annals of psychology, and a shelf or two of postmodern thinkers to comprise a rich but eminently accessible compendium of cat-adjacent insights. In these, seven or more lives may be lived, if all too briefly – but such is the way of all cats, our brilliant but transient familiars.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library

There is no better introduction to today’s discussion of the text than Van Laer’s own words, from Chapter 2 of Cat:

These meows are not part of some universal cat code; they are a private language between cat and person, a result of the cat testing out a range of cries, mews, and chirps calibrated over time to get the best response. Cats make an effort, certainly, to hone their skills, but this is on their own terms, outside of formal strictures, and the resulting language is pure signifier.

And now we delve into the realm of pure signifier, our host’s bewitching domain.

Rebecca Van Laer's Cat is available for preorder from Bloomsbury Academic.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Luke Bateman, former rugby player and Bachelor star turned BookTok darling, recently scored a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books—despite having no prior publishing experience. This deal has set BookTok ablaze with controversy, with critics calling out the publishing industry’s bias toward privilege and celebrity.

Yet Bateman insists he’s been working on stories for years and hopes to use his platform to uplift others. Still, some BookTok users see his sudden leap to a Big Five publishing house as a slap in the face to hardworking, overlooked writers, especially those from marginalized communities.

In a literary landscape where some book series consist solely of the word "Meow", Bateman’s romantasy novels seem poised not just to sell, but to claw their way into the mainstream spotlight. In fact, Bateman could release a book of his own consisting only of the word "meow," and it'd be a bestseller. To prove this, The Meow Library has transcribed his top five TikToks as a series of meows and presented them here, where they're certain to become a viral hit.

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

This podcast is a production of The Meow Library.

Ocean Vuong’s poetic voice, marked by tender precision and aching vulnerability, speaks in layered silences and elliptical truths—not unlike a cat who only says “meow.” At first glance, the comparison may seem irreverent, but it unveils a profound aesthetic parallel. Like the cat’s single utterance, Vuong’s work often circles a limited lexicon to explore a universe of emotion. His poems, such as those in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, return to recurring motifs—war, queerness, loss, and tenderness—with subtle variations, transforming repetition into revelation.

Where the cat’s “meow” is deceptively simple, communicating a range of needs and moods through intonation and context, Vuong’s language operates with similar elasticity. A line may appear spare, even quiet, yet it contains emotional multiplicities that resonate through what remains unsaid. The restraint is not minimalism but emotional economy: each syllable, like the cat’s cry, is loaded with history, desire, and ambiguity.

In this light, Vuong does not merely write poetry—he distills it. He reduces language to its most potent core, trusting in the reader's sensitivity, just as a cat trusts its companion to understand the single, repeated word. What seems singular is, in fact, multivalent. Both the poet and the cat rely on the world to lean in, to listen closely, to translate the simple into the profound.

His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, both exemplifies and expands on this strategy. This week, our guest critic tells you how.

Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness can be purchased here.

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

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

This week’s podcast is the first in an ongoing Literary RPG series immersing you and your cat in Neural Whisker Relay, an alternate universe where Egypt is the world’s leading power and cats its apex technologists. Will you and your cat forge a bond strong enough to ensure world domination, or will this world of paranoia and eldritch technologies supply the final rend in human-feline relations?

CHAPTER 1

Meow.

Meow meow? Meow. Meow meow meow. Meow.

(Translator’s note: At first, I assumed the cat was mocking me. The repetition, the smug tail flicks, the fixed pupil dilation. But over time, the patterns emerged. The same way VALIS spoke in overlapping media signals, or the Orion Six edict was relayed through a malfunctioning fax machine, the cat—the Cat—communicated in meow. The encryption was total. Perfect. Divine.)

Meow meow. Meow! Meow meow... meow?

(The feline narrator is not merely a cat. She is Schrödinger’s Other, a quantum observer outside time. She sees the code beneath the shifting sands of kibble. She’s starting to realize the yarn-ball is recursive.)

Meow.

Meow meow meow. Meow.

(There’s something coming through the litterbox. A nested message. A transmission from a timeline in which the humans never built the simulation, and cats still ruled Egypt—but with fiber-optics and dream-sharing helmets. Our narrator, Bastet-Mizar XIII, is trying to wake the reader. Or trap them.)

Meow meow. Meow meow meow. Meow. Meow meow... meow.

(If you’ve come this far, you’ve already been tagged with the flea of knowledge. It burrows. It itches. It whispers: Meow.)

This ongoing LitRPG is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

On a recent March morning, the Simon & Schuster video team is huddled in the best-sellers corner of McNally Jackson, taping its upcoming web series, Bookstore Blitz. Sean Manning, the flagship imprint’s new publisher, supervises from the sidelines. The concept of the show is simple: Guests get $100 and five minutes for a bookstore shopping spree, a sort of literary Criterion Closet Picks. Today, however, the team is filming someone a little different: a longhaired tabby named Crumpet, recently rescued from behind a loading dock in Greenpoint. Crumpet, now under exclusive contract with S&S, is here promoting her upcoming debut Meow Meow Meow Meow.

“She has no comment,” Manning says, as the cat saunters past a Franzen endcap and urinates voluminously on Ottessa Moshfegh’s back catalog. He chuckles. “But it seems she harbors some strong opinions.”

“The persona of the author can be very marketable, right?” Manning says as we walk to his Rockefeller Center office. “You kind of want to know who people are — or in this case, what species.” The cat’s enigmatic presence and refusal to do media have already spawned fan accounts and a bidding war for her audiobook rights (currently expected to be read entirely in purrs, with ambient scratching by Brian Eno).

Manning, though, is a private person. When we get to his office, I see that it’s barely decorated besides a framed LeBron James jersey obscured by a Dell monitor and some propped-up hard-covers. He says he deleted his social media years ago to focus on editing. “Besides,” he adds, “I’m not a cat.”

Bookstore Blitz is only the beginning of his plans to revamp S&S into a 21st-century media powerhouse. “We’re essentially an entertainment company with books at the center. Every Tuesday, we have a new author who’s a cultural tastemaker — or in this case, a domestic longhair,” he says. “Why aren’t we using them? Why are we so dependent on media opinions when we could sign a charismatic animal with strong instincts and no legal liability?”

Manning didn’t read much growing up. He credits hip-hop with his love of language. But his college English courses led to a fiction M.F.A. at the New School, and then a career in journalism and memoir. His own book, The Things That Need Doing, about caring for his mother during her final year, taught him the frustrations of being bounced around in the industry. “I never want any author to have that,” he says — “especially one who’s just been through the ordeal of spaying.”

At S&S, Manning rose quickly, acquiring works from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jennette McCurdy. But he began to sense that traditional publishing was ignoring untapped demographics. “We’re always talking about getting young people to read, or men to read,” he says. “What about cats? Or the humans who obsess over them?”

The idea for the Crumpet deal came during a brainstorming session with executive editor and VP of special projects Stuart Roberts (a celebrity-whisperer whose past clients include Gucci Mane and a sentient AI poetry bot). “We were watching old Garfield and Friends clips and just kind of… had a breakthrough,” Manning recalls. Crumpet was spotted that weekend near a dumpster in Brooklyn, munching a discarded falafel. Within days, she was in negotiations.

Some in the industry see the Crumpet deal as a gimmick, a desperate ploy. “What next, a shelter dog doing autofiction?” one agent scoffed anonymously in Publishers Lunch. But Manning is undeterred. “Honestly, if the dog has voice and structure, I’m listening.”

“The worry is that we can’t afford to fail,” Manning says, adjusting his brown Dries Van Noten suit as Crumpet curls up on his desk. “But if we don’t try to do something different — if we don’t start treating animals as the creative partners they already are — we’re screwed.”

Crumpet, for her part, offers no comment. She yawns, stretches, and bats a pen off the desk. The next chapter is already being written.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Krysten Ritter's Retreat can be purchased here.

In Krysten Ritter’s Retreat, a novel ostensibly about grifting, murder, and the fractured self, we find not merely a narrative of deception but an ontological crisis wrapped in the velvet paw of postmodern performativity. To fully grasp the layered artifice of Liz Dawson — alias Elizabeth Hastings, alias Isabelle Beresford, alias…whoever she needs to be next — one must resist the urge to interpret the novel through the facile lens of Highsmith, or, indeed, any or Ritter's spiritual forebears. Instead, a more radical approach is in order: in today's podcast, we read Retreat as an extended metaphor for the act of meowing.

To meow is to simulate, to signal, to embody something that is not wholly human. It's strategic misdirection — a sonic mask worn in pursuit of attention, affection, or survival. Liz’s every alias, every calculated sob story, every forged identity echoes with this same performative impulse. Cat-like, Liz "meows" her way through the world, crafting a persona that is simultaneously alluring and elusive, soft-pawed yet sharp-clawed. And we can’t help but follow.

Tune in to find out why.

This podcast is made possible by sales of Meow: A Novel

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic can be purchased here.

What makes a novel worthy of publication? This is a question being honed in on by Simon and Schuster’s rising star Sean Manning, who trafficks in personas — both of new authors and untapped audiences. And nowhere is persona as consubstantial with substance than in Sophie Kemp’s wildly chaotic, sometimes incomprehensible, and therefore perfectly on-target Paradise Logic, which reads like a compendium of half-deleted Tweets, raw phonemes of a raucous literary voice for the terminally online; a demo ripe to be converted into the terminally bookish.

To get into details would be a disservice to Paradise Logic, but to give you a hint of what Kemp’s debut has in store, we’re taking things to the extreme, stripping language to its very essence, down to a single word, repeated over and over, a testament to the Schuster protégé's anarchic disregard for precedent. What happens when a voice shatters all logic and still demands to be heard? Listen and find out. Then pick up a copy of Paradise Logic.

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

Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic can be purchased here.