Radiant Whispers

Do you know what happened to Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus right after Christmas? They all became refugees. They were already dirt poor and homeless; now, they also became fugitives. Today we do a very different take on the Christmas story. God is in great mortal peril. Joseph and Mary – two kids who are barely 18 and 12 years old, most likely – have to cross six hundred miles (one thousand Kms)...

Did you know that there are dozens and dozens of stories of a great flood in the most diverse and disparate cultures, from Japan to the Maya, from Babylon to Polynesia, from the Eskimos to the Australian Aborigines and Africa? Noah's Ark is the story of a vast ecological catastrophe caused by human blindness. Do you think this may be a relevant story nowadays? I believe it could be the most compel...

Buenos días and welcome back to Radiant Whispers! Today it's all sheer fun and wild imagination with the big and spiky Roald Dahl, surely one of the most beloved writers of all time. And rightly so - who hasn't been thrilled, amused and delighted by his stories? They're just so quirky, vibrant and delightful that they stand on a class of their own. Dahl is one of those geniuses that are so ahead o...

Juan José Arreola is one of the greatest Latin-American writers of the XX Century, one of the first to dare to abandon realism. This is how Professor George D Schade introduces Juan José Arreola and Bestiary, his "Book of Fabled Beasts": Arreola jabs at complacency and ruthlessly exposes pompous and hypocritical attitudes. He takes a depressing view of most human relationships, and in a large numb...

The Song of Wisdom is one of the oldest poems in world literature. It ponders how men are willing to face indescribable risks to descend into the bowels of the earth in tiny baskets or flimsy ropes to find treasure in hidden places that not even the penetrating gaze of the falcon will ever see; where not even the fearsome lion would ever dare to enter. Human beings will face any danger, overcome a...

Today we open our space to a brilliant Franco- Argentinian writer: Julio Cortázar. We listen to one of his most celebrated stories, inspired by one of the most beautiful and enigmatic amphibians on Earth: the tiny Axolotl. Axolotl is a meditation on that mortal danger that loneliness is for us human beings. We see a lonely man disintegrate; we are witnesses to the way loneliness, the lack of frien...

The story we read today is by a true giant of Latin American and world literature, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. The Circular Ruins is a masterpiece of fantasy literature, and deals with how dreams are manifested in reality… Borges' launching pad is a passage from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll in which Tweedledee draws Alice's attention to the sleeping Red King, and claims that s...

The story we read today takes us back to the mythical city of Babylon, that great capital on the banks of the Euphrates, acclaimed for those legendary hanging gardens that were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The prophet Daniel was transported there as a prisoner when he was only 12 or 13 years old, after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, in the year 587 BC, at the end of a...

Today I will read you a perfect story by the Portuguese José Saramago. Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, after the publication of his novel Blindness, which is the most disturbing dystopia I have ever read. I promise you that all those apocalyptic TV series and movies that you've seen, where life in the future becomes impossible for the protagonists, pale before the stark but fr...

Today I am going to read you a fragment of an old text that is considered -and I quote- "one of the most noble works of world literature": the Book of Job. This is the story of a very wealthy man who lived 3,000 years ago, in the Bronze Age (the days of King David and King Solomon, the Iliad and the Odyssey 3,000 years ago)... The Book of Job is so splendidly well written that many experts place i...

Today I have the pleasure of reading you a story by the great Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti. It is a great example of Benedetti's genius to create in just four or five pages a world of great emotional intensity. I sincerely hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed recording it.

Today we talk about the thorny issue of identity and race in Latin America. In 2019 we remember 500 years since the beginning of the conquest of America at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores, and the new Mexican government is demanding from Spain today an apology for the events that occurred 500 years ago...

Today I’m reading you a text by the brilliant GK Chesterton, he of The Adventures of Father Brown and a great metaphysical thriller entitled The Man who was Thursday. Chesterton's prose and thought are dazzling, so you have to take it in little sips, often gasping with open mouth, because his mind is full of light and colours. The passage that I am going to read to you is from the last chapter of...

What is this podcast about? What are these "Radiant Whispers”?