Café Alexandria

Café Alexandria is a Portuguese interview show about books, authors, and the wider cultural work that surrounds them. Its recent episodes suggest a patient format, guided by careful framing rather than quick opinion. The show is most at home when a book becomes a way to think about a larger problem. Carolina Fulcher’s Deadly brings solitude, childhood trauma, apparent death, and the strange intimacy of watching strangers’ funerals into focus. The conversation treats loneliness not as a neat problem to solve, but as a state that can sit quietly inside an outwardly ordinary life. Pedro Vieira’s Vénus em Chamas expands the lens toward art history, religion, class, power, and women whose images have been used or altered by others. The discussion of figures such as Maria Magdalena, Joana d’Arc, Harriet Tubman, Irma Lúcia, and others stays alert to what history preserves and what it erases. Ângelo Delgado’s Foi o Preto gives the show one of its sharper social conversations, centered on racism, injustice, Cape Verdean family memory, and Portugal in the 1990s. The episode pays attention to form as well as subject, especially the use of letters, historical context, and intergenerational storytelling. Salvador da Cunha’s Magnetic Companies moves into a different register, asking how communication, leadership, reputation, and talent shape organizations. Even there, the show keeps returning to human contact and the discomfort of impersonal systems. Delfim Sardo’s Uivar à Lua brings contemporary art, essays, criticism, friendship, and historical responsibility into a quieter but dense exchange. His reflections on writing about artists who are no longer alive give the episode a grave, precise weight. Across these conversations, Café Alexandria favors detail over spectacle. The interviews do not rush to simplify difficult material. Questions often restate the premise, isolate a tension, and let the guest answer at length. The result is literate, calm, and grounded in cultural practice. It is not a celebrity book-chat format. It is closer to an editorial table where fiction, essays, art, politics, memory, and process are treated as connected forms of attention. The show suits listeners who want literary discussion with context, patience, and moral seriousness.