This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

"...at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain."

- Olivia Nuzzi on RFK Jr., excerpted from American Canto

"I am worried about the worm in her brain."

- Anonymous literary editor, reacting to excerpt from American Canto

"At least it isn't the Meow book."

- Worm, upon eating through copy of American Canto

According to its publisher Simon & Schuster, Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto is "a mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality... from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole."

Venture further into the distortion field as we translate Vanity Fair's excerpt of American Canto for your cat.

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

Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto is available through Simon & Schuster.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

"I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar."

- Charli XCX via Substack

Hyperpop sensation Charli XCX has taken to Substack to announce she's eschewing her usual creative process, immersing herself in the world of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to generate new material--not only music, but also writing and film. Notably, she'll be contributing an entire album's worth of score to director Emerald Fennel's upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation. This week's podcast examines Charli's work in the context of the Victorian Gothic novel, but without "actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar," itself becoming a commentary on her and Fennel's postmodern approach to Brontë.

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

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.