On this week’s episode of the Flame Tree Myth & Fiction Podcast, we feature two powerful short stories linked by their discussions of motherhood - but don’t be mistaken, these stories are anything but sweet.

Featuring:

‘Pegasus’ by Danai Christopoulou (00.50), narrated by Amanda Benzecry. A narrative that follows the famed pegasus, through its creation, violent birth and its resulting vow of revenge. This story can be found in Medusa, a book published last year in our Myths, Gods & Immortals series.

& ‘The Mother’s Eyes’ by Charles Dickens (11.26), narrated by Nathan Chatelier. A story that follows a man who is haunted by the eyes of a grieving mother after he indirectly causes the death of her child. Published within Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories.

Biographies:

Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a queer Greek SFF author and editor currently living in Sweden. Their short fiction has been published in Fusion Fragment and others, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for a Nebula Award. Follow them on X for regular updates.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812. Dickens kept up a career in journalism as well as writing short stories and novels, with much of his work being serialised before being published as books.

Amanda Benzecry (voice actor) regularly narrates books for Audible, is on the panel for the RNIB and is a frequent contributor (both as a narrator and a writer) to TNF Soundings, providing audio material for the visually impaired.

Nathan Chatelier is a British voiceover artist with almost fifty audiobooks recorded alongside thousands of other projects, from videogames to the Mean Girls West End trailer. Check out his demos.

This episode is hosted by Bea.

‘Pegasus’ is © 2023 Danai Christopoulou and was originally published in The Icarus Writing Collective in 2023 and appeared in Medusa (Flame Tree Publishing, 2024).

‘The Mother’s Eyes’ by Charles Dickens was first published in The Old Curiosity Shop and Other Tales, Chapman & Hall in 1841 and more recently appeared in Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2020).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

The first of our monthly specials! In this week’s episode, Olivia revisits her conversation with the editors of The Open Heart & Short Stories by Catherine Wells, Patrick Parrinder and Emelyne Godfrey. Recorded at The London Book Fair, this episode is full of insights and revelations about the often overlooked authorial work of H.G. Wells’s wife.

The Open Heart is one of the latest books to come out in our Beyond & Within series. It collates Catherine Wells’s previously published work alongside her unfinished novella, ‘The Open Heart’, which has never before been published!

Thank you to our guests Patrick & Emelyne. The Open Heart is now available to order through our website.

Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and President of the H.G. Wells Society .He is the author of many books on H.G. Wells, science fiction and modern literature, and is General Editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (2011–24).

Emelyne Godfrey has a PhD from Birkbeck College. She is author of several books on the long nineteenth century including Mrs Pankhurst’s Bodyguard: On the Trail of ‘Kitty’ Marshall and the Met Police ‘Cats’ (The History Press, 2023). She writes widely on women’s history, crime, science fiction and the supernatural.

Catherine Wells (1872–1927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband’s literary outpourings, while she was in fact herself a serious writer, quietly creating her own stories and poems, long-neglected until now.

A big thank you to Claire Cartwright and Carol Goodwin at Novocon for inspiring our Desert Island Books segment!

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.

In this week’s episode of Flame Tree’s Myth & Fiction podcast, we are again visiting the horror genre but this time we are honing in on how the human mind and often madness can connect itself to the supernatural. Essentially, two short stories that populate the subgenre of psychological horror.

Featuring:

‘He Will Hear Us Coming’ by Anna Ziegelhof (00.38), narrated by Amanda Benzecry. A story about a young woman’s homecoming from a mental institution and her quest to discover the truth about the ghost that haunts her. Published within our 2020 collection, Footsteps in the Dark.

& ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe (22:37), narrated by Nick. A classic short story that follows a man driven to insanity and eventually confession by the sound of his victim’s forever beating heart. This story was first published in 1843 but can be found in our collection titled American Gothic Short Stories.

Biographies:

Anna Ziegelhof is originally from Germany, but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works in tech by day and writes short fiction by night. She is the author of several horror and science fiction short stories, such as ‘Dimenso-Yarn Ad Copy Draft’ (Shoreline of Infinity), ‘The Night Guard’ (Close the Gate anthology), ‘Hello, Funny Horse’ (Crimson Streets), ‘Little Grey Weirdos’ (The Future Fire), and ‘My Little Danger-Stranger’ (Daily Science Fiction).

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an influential author, poet, editor and literary critic that wrote during the American Romantic Movement. His better-known works include his poems ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’, and the short stories ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.

Amanda Benzecry (voice actor) regularly narrates books for Audible, is on the panel for the RNIB and is a frequent contributor (both as a narrator and a writer) to TNF Soundings, providing audio material for the visually impaired.

This episode is hosted by Bea.

‘He Will Hear Us Coming’ is © 2020 Anna Ziegelhof and appeared in Footsteps in the Dark (Flame Tree Publishing, 2020).

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ was first published in The Pioneer, 1843 and more recently in American Gothic (Flame Tree Publishing, 2019).

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Music is an extract of Sunbeams by Allen Stroud, from his Fractal Series album, licensed courtesy of fpl-digital 2025.

This podcast is hosted and sometimes narrated by Beatrix Ambery (also audio editor), Olivia Jackson (also podcast coordinator) and Nick Wells (also producer).

Chosen from hundreds of wonderful tales, short stories such as these are selected by our short window open submission process, giving opportunities to writers of all levels of experience, culture and location. Look out for our submission announcements, and see the full list here: flametreepublishing.com/gothic-fantasy-book-series-list.html

Our full range of thematic short stories, epic tales, mythology and folklore titles are available at all good bookstores, online and in retail, and at flametreepublishing.com

Flame Tree Publishing, Independent Publisher of the Year 2024, British Fantasy Society. Beautiful Books, Timeless Storytelling, Fresh Perspectives.

The Flame Tree Myth and Fiction podcast is created and © copyright 2025 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd.