Nancy Stohlman

Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities

Big Table Publishing, 2018

*Finalist for a Colorado Book Award!

Step right up and meet a woman so determined to be a star she’ll try anything, including spray on Instant Fame! Meet her reflection, who dreas of a life of her own and manages to find lone on the internet! See the man desperately trying to earn a world record in teh most bizarre way possible! Learn the origins of the Four-Legged Woman and the Human Skeleton! Clown mothers, suicidal ringmasters, cult leaders who teach the cha-cha and Alaska Jackson’s Traveling Medicine Show…each one takes center stange in this vaudeville of flash fiction. Flash Fiction, microfiction, short-short stories…regardless of the name, it’s all the same–a compressed story that packs a punch. Enter a cabaret of the weird, the absurd, and the bizarre with this bold and bawdy new collection from Big Table Publishing.

Read the Reviews!

“You Might Want to Get a Handjob from Rick Moranis” by Jonathan Cardew in Bending Genres

In essence, Oddities is just that—a carnival ride through fame, misfortune, and more misfortune. Usually all three at once, with a cheap bottle of absinthe thrown in. True, there are the freaks (the Human Skeleton, the Ape Lady, the Electric Lady, Boy with Breasts, etc. etc.) but Stohlman holds a mirror to our own vanities and insecurities like we’re wobbling through our own peculiar halls of mirrors.

Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities by Hillary Leftwich in Heavy Feather Review

Much like the two-faced lady or the conjoined twins, Stohlman seems to be running alongside of her twin from another dimension, a more popular, put together version. But with anything that reflects bigger, better, and brighter, Stohlman summons emotions in each piece that can’t be blurred or escaped from. That’s what makes this mixed bag of oddities about as real as it can get.

“Brilliant New Collection by Nancy Stohlman” by Kathy Fish on Flash Fiction Retreats

“Well, readers, I promise you this collection is like none other you’ve read…The pieces are so inventive and daring, with a voice that leaps off the page. Nancy deals with deep truths in a way that bucks straight realism.”

“Review of Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities“ by Jonathan Montgomery on Boulder Poetry Tribe

“If you want an easily labeled genre that best defines this work, you may have to make one up. In Madam Velvet’s Nancy continues to explore the multi-dimensional frontiers of earlier works, particularly 2013’s The Monster Opera (Bartleby Snopes), a story-within-a-story opera/fiction hybrid which challenges the idea that a work of prose must be confined to the page. ”