Oct 14, 2026 · 1 hr · 13 segments
Welcome to The Lost Shelf - the podcast where we invite writers to rescue neglected works of genius from obscurity! In Episode 4, Art O'Connor and Niamh Campbell discuss Marie Calloway's short story…
Niamh CampbellGuestArt O'ConnorHost
I've wanted to teach this text or talk about it for years, and I was always too afraid of it because I do consider it to be straightforwardly evil.
And that is, that's my feeling reading it the first time, which I, I think I read it years after it came out.
But also I saw in it the kernel of a lot of work that came after about sort of squalid femininity and the internet, and a kind of pre-Epstein files fetishization of childishness in women, in American culture particularly, that kind of headed towards like Dime Square and all that sort of subcultural-
... stuff which I consider to be very of negligible quality or relevance really to-
It's puerile for the sake of it, but it, it kind of predated that and prefigured it.
And reading it after all of these events have happened, I realized that this work had so much more subversive power to it than a lot of what followed.
So I think we only became aware of this moment in American writing with Cat Person, a viral story, which was effectively this sort of, I suppose, a performance of feminine naivety in order to set up male redundancy as the punchline.
It's similarly using a sort of regressive feminine emptiness, um, to set up a, a very, very vicious depiction of a man and who was originally named when the story came out-
I've wanted to teach this text or talk about it for years, and I was always too afraid of it because I do consider it to be straightforwardly evil.
And that is, that's my feeling reading it the first time, which I, I think I read it years after it came out.
But also I saw in it the kernel of a lot of work that came after about sort of squalid femininity and the internet, and a kind of pre-Epstein files fetishization of childishness in women, in American culture particularly, that kind of headed towards like Dime Square and all that sort of subcultural-
... stuff which I consider to be very of negligible quality or relevance really to-
It's puerile for the sake of it, but it, it kind of predated that and prefigured it.
And reading it after all of these events have happened, I realized that this work had so much more subversive power to it than a lot of what followed.
So I think we only became aware of this moment in American writing with Cat Person, a viral story, which was effectively this sort of, I suppose, a performance of feminine naivety in order to set up male redundancy as the punchline.
It's similarly using a sort of regressive feminine emptiness, um, to set up a, a very, very vicious depiction of a man and who was originally named when the story came out-
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