Temporary Palaces # (Part iii of iii, The Stranger)

Temporary Palaces is a special triplicate of hour-long broadcasts that serialises an unabridged rendition of Kyra Simone's debut collection, Palace of Rubble (Tenement Press, 2022). Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Saddam Hussein’s demolished palaces, Simone’s Palace of Rubble is a collection of one-page stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the front pages of the newspaper.

Offering surreal glimpses of what might be identified as echoes of a post-Republic America, an imagined Middle East, and some other unnamed and unreachable world, Palace chronicles a vivid landscape of crumbling towers and heart-broken animals, eclipses, comets, and lovers in abandoned rooms. Produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham.

Kyra Simone is a writer from Los Angeles, now based in Brooklyn. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of literary journals, including The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Conjunctions, Fence, The Anthology of Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and part of a two-woman team running the editorial office of Zone Books.

"From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure. The world she constructs is recognisable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact, possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time".

— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun.

"I was hooked by the very first sentence of Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble: ‘A breaking wave collapses on the bank before two half-naked women on white Arabian horses.’ The sentence is so precise, down to the use of the erotic “collapses.” Plunged into this direct, clear, and mysterious arrangement of words, I was always left wondering what will happen next. Where will the next sentence take me? I was never disappointed. Simone is able to maintain and shift that propulsive curiosity throughout the book. While dancing with us, each sentence is a journey. Each story is a multi-faceted gem—a ‘beguiling dream of eternal cinema".

— John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums.

"Majestic flights of fancy spun around ravaged landscapes and savage realities, these are remarkable prose poems for the 21st century".

— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters.

"Reading Simone’s work is reminiscent of an archaeological excavation. The writing has dug to the past and emerged in the future, passing on its way those civilisations, kingdoms and palaces long since blown away or buried, it is covered in their dust. I can’t help but think, isn’t this madness? Isn’t life beautiful".

— Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood.