Word Temple host Katherine Hastings introduces The Green Carnation, an 1894 novel by Robert Hichens that played a part in the famous trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for homosexual activity, followed by a recording of Wilde's poem "the Ballad of Reading Gaol," written after he served two years in that prison.

In the second half of the program, Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, reads James Joyce's The Sisters - his first published work of fiction which would later become the first story in The Dubliners.