Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere
A book that speaks directly to society’s “elephants in the living room” through kooky hooliganism and satire
Five-year-old Bonanza’s mother tells her to “keep digging” as she buries her dolls, and ultimately herself. The dead poet Robert Lowell reappears as a high school student. Meanwhile, at Butterfly Farm, the protagonist dishes up some unconventional environmental justice. Even the ones who kill with oil spills have a voice in this bizarre primer of the exquisite, the mundane, and the insane.
The stories are raw and dreamlike, breaking time/space reality rules, committing literary misdemeanors, and requiring the reader to not only have an imagination but to be willing to stretch it beyond normal fictional boundaries. Nina Hart goes right to the dark and often taboo topics that haunt us in our sleep and waking life, addressing issues of ecology, education, childhood, play, and animal rights. An important dialogue written with political overtones, the book is intimate, deeply vulnerable, and very funny.
Nina Hart is a writer, performer, and creativity coach trained in the Kaizen Muse method. She recently released her first collection of surreal short fictions called “Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere”. The book has been selected as a Short Stories (Adult Fiction) category finalist in Foreword Reviews’ prestigious IndieFab Book of the Year Awards. Foreword Reviews cited the book as “A brave experiment with fiction and form…”(Amanda McCorquodale) and The Santa Fe New Mexican wrote that: “Hart extends her creative license to its utmost limits.” (Loren Bienvenu).
The Audio Book
Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere is now an audio book published by Talking Book pub, with music composed by Miguel Frasconi!
“A book that is simply like no other: Nina Hart’s pages are like tumbleweeds on fire, they’re outrageous, marvelous, puzzling-glorious-profound. My wish is for the impact of her rare voice to penetrate the hard shell of this conservative and restrictive moment in American literary culture.”
“Lyrical and urgent, tender and off-kilter, Nina Hart’s Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere is a marvel. The imagination and sensibility manifested in her prose poems draws the reader into a world inhabited by a menagerie—of people, of animals, all somehow imperiled yet earnestly moving through the world. By the end of the narrative, a chorus has emerged…strong enough to evoke a Spoon River for the 21st century.”
“Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere is a stunning phantasmagoria where words (and stories) crack apart, humans change to animals, poets to children, animals to primal pristine signifiers, countries to swatches of steamy atmosphere and garbage.”
“Nina’s work is genius. It is genius. I have never been as transported and electrified and, yes, challenged, in my reading life, while also being uplifted to an outraged moral clarity and courage.
Surreal, daring, riffing, trumpeting, strange — the book is like a Christmas cracker that just keeps sending up fireworks and candy and small talkative trolls.
If you need a glorious and strange anthem to reclaim the battered but fierce spirit of— take your pick— women, wildness, witches, ferocity, courage, popcorn— then you must read this book.”