Crown and Cinders

Today we're diving into the shadows cast by crowns, where love and power dance their oldest, most dangerous waltz. Because here's what Disney never tells you: every court has its secrets, and every crown sits heavy with the weight of what rulers will do to protect what they love.

Featuring 

Naked Villainy by Joshua K. Haarstad (02.31), read by Nathan Chatelier. A story about a king who discovers that protecting his son means rewriting the very nature of truth itself. This tale can be found in Flame Tree’s Epic Fantasy short story anthology. 

Cinderella by Brothers Grimm (30.34), read by Bea. In the Grimm version, there are no fairy godmothers with sparkling wands. There's only a girl, a tree that grows from tears, and birds that see when everybody else chooses blindness. This fairytale can be found in Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. 

Biographies

Joshua K. Haarstad began writing after graduating from the University of Minnesota, where he primarily studied literature, writing, film, Spanish, and English. He resides in Minnesota and prefers to spend his winters avoiding the cold with as large a book as he can find. His favourite genre is fantasy, but he also loves horror, mystery, and science fiction.

German academics, folklorists and authors Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) are best known for their collection of fairy tales, which, next to the Luther Bible, remain the most well-known and widely distributed text in German cultural history.

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 was hosted by Shilpa Varma. To find out more about our writer-in-residence and her role at Flame Tree, click here.

‘Naked Villainy’ is ©2019 Joshua K. Haarstad and appeared in Epic Fantasy (Flame Tree Publishing, 2019).

‘Cinderella’ by Brothers Grimm was first published in 1812 as ‘Aschenputtel’ in Kinder- und Hausmärchen and later appeared in Brother Grimm Fairy Tales (Flame Tree Publishing, 2019).

#storytelling #fairytale #brothersgrimm #epicfantasy #cinderella #lqbtqfiction

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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

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