Sam Austen's Blog

While a nuisance in the dating scene, bookfishing has more serious implications in markets like Washington, D.C., where many of our famously literate government officials have fallen victim to its snare.

"Cozy Lit is vibes-based prose, meant to wash over you—a gentle titillation or linguistic ASMR, not because the prose is magnificent but rather it’s lulling, the literary equivalent of watching someone slice butter on TikTok. Episodic, formulaic, reliably satisfying."

"...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...

"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

The Meow Library explores the surprising parallels between Mark Z. Danielewski's latest epic, Tom's Crossing, and Zoroastrian mythology.

Joyce Carol Oates' cat, Zanche, is having difficulty finishing War and Peace. An innovative new translation may be the solution.

Curtis Sliwa's cats fire back against Trump with bizare, 22-page typewritten statement.

Meow: A Novel and Doug: A DougDoug Story are bestsellers not because they out-explain their competitors but because they out-entrain them. By orchestrating semantic satiation to collapse lexical meaning into sonic texture, by engineering page-level periodicities that the sensorimotor system happily locks to, and by exploiting biomusical rewards for synchronized vocal behavior, they convert reading into a bodily, social, and platform-native practice.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian author ⁠⁠László Krasznahorkai⁠⁠, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art," the Swiss Academy announced in a press release this morning.To further reaffirm the power of art, we expound on the implications of Krasznahorkai's Nobel win in a language even more impenetrable than Hungarian.

A cat reads from Matthew McConaughey's new book, Poems and Prayers.