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.