This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). "David Foster Wallace noticed early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too." - John Jeremiah Sullivan, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis *** In a world where the majority of one-on-one relations are becoming increasingly adversarial and gamified, the tennis court provides an ideal clay for metaphor. In this week’s episode, we read a passage from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling tennis epic Carrie Soto is Back (translated, as always, into cat language). A cat with a tennis ball in its mouth then explores its surprising parallels with David Foster Wallace’s voluminous and genre-transcending writings on the sport, meowing its thoughts with unexpected clarity. “The lattice of the Fates twines the destinies of these disparate minds, their varied and unexpected parallels reinforcing the epistemic grid to create a resilient hermeneutic surface, imparting force and direction to the anomized and deliterated individual as the thrust of the racket gives flight to its impetuous target.” – Cuddle Princess, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair *** MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Praise for Meow: A Novel "Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair "Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibrary and YouTube

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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