This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Han Kang's The Vegetarian can be purchased here.

The basis of Nobel laureate Han Kang's The Vegetarian is a line by Korean poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants."

But some, like today's interviewee, believe that humans should be cats.

A Meow Library translator has taken exception to Han Kang being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, citing the many errors in the English editions of The Vegetarian and her other, lesser-known works. Certain that the Nobel committee is unfamiliar with her books in their original Korean, and that the translated work is not truly of Kan's authorship, he feels that the award should be revoked.

"Any English translation of Han Kang is bound to mislead. The tonal properties of Korean are totally lost to the Anglophone world. Meows are the only language that could possibly convey the melancholy and gravitas of Kang's original prose -- and perhaps even surpass it," he remarks.

After a brief introductory statement, our translator recites a 27-minute passage of The Vegetarian, translated his way. It is his wish that the Nobel committee take note of his improvements and distribute the 2024 Literature prize accordingly.

This podcast is made possible by sales of our first translation for cats, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Sally Rooney's Intermezzo is available here.

Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product,one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.

-- Andrea Long Chu for Vulture

While much has been written in praise of Sally Rooney's frank Millenial realism, its Marxist underpinnings are only beginning to be explored. Theory, as ever, can only be thinly illustrative of the market forces propelling Rooney's work into the academic and popular spotlight. The Meow Library believes that the magnitude of Intermezzo's impact can only be understood through praxis, so our analysis takes the form of thousands of undifferentiated "meows," thereby converting it, like Rooney's subversions-as-Harlequin-Romance, into an eminently viral force with potential to destabilize and transform its very means of propagation: a force as great as Love itself, if not greater.

Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats is supported by sales of Meow: A Novel and other Meow Library titles.

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library⁠.

Matthew Davis's ⁠Let Me Try Again⁠ can be purchased ⁠here⁠.

Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is a hilarious, deeply human look Gen Z's calamitous superego. It opens on a suicidal fantasy, quickly giving way to a dense and dizzying edifice of self-recrimination — centered, in true Zoomer fashion, on the singular, cosmic theme of much “alt-lit” — a twentysomething breakup. But this time, it’s done with class.

Davis’s dire, uproarious idiom evokes an atmosphere of mortifying regret (the very quiddity of Zoomer being), riding the inexorable crests and valleys of the on-again, off-again “situationship” to Oblivion and back. And somehow, he makes sure you enjoy every second of it.

There exists no better analog to the book's central refrain than the fraught, tenuous, but always rewarding bond between human and cat, so we will now meow at you for 30 minutes, giving you time to think about all you’ve loved and lost, drop the pathos, and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Sales of Meow: A Novel help fund The Meow Library's continuing research into the art and science of meowing.

Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is available through Amazon and wherever books are sold.