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TEMPORARY PALACES
Kyra Simone


A series of three broadcasts based on
an unbridged reading of Simone’s
debut collection, Palace of Rubble ...


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TEMPORARY PALACES is a special triplicate of hour-long
broadcasts wherein the author reads her work in full.

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. Accompanying these hybrid texts are images of vacant buildings along the California coast, which draw from the photo series ‘Vandalism’ by John Divola.




                                       


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

Kyra Simone’s prose is a blowtorch of liberation. 

Filip Marinovich



Airing in monthly
installments ...


 13:00 (BST)        22/04/23        ‘Tarzan the Apeman’ (I/III) 

In which the author reads ...

                                             ‘Palace of Rubble’ 
                                             ‘When Language is Gone from Bodies’
                                             ‘The Boys of Summer’
                                              ‘The View from the Tower’ 
                                             ‘World Business’
                                             ‘County Fair’
                                             ‘Still Life with Parrot’
                                             ‘Museum’
                                             ‘Today, Clouds’
                                             ‘Foreign Affairs’
                                             ‘The Empty Lot’
                                             ‘Dear Pauline’
                                             ‘Cadets No More’
                                             ‘The Wedding Exit’
                                             ‘The Nomad’
                                             ‘Blue Moon’
                                             ‘The Diver’s Song’
                                             ‘Pawns Talk of Scars’
                                             ‘Den of Millionaires’











 13:00 (BST)       27/05/23        ‘The Wild One’  (II/III) 

In which the author reads ...

                                             • ‘The Great Escape’
                                             ‘The Revolving Door’
                                             ‘The Tunnel’
                                             ‘May’s End’ 
                                             ‘A Certain Music’ 
                                             ‘The Era is Over’ 
                                             ‘Obituary for Mrs. H’
                                             ‘Empty Chairs’
                                             ‘Somewhere Else’
                                            ‘The Prairie is on Fire’
                                             ‘The Lonely Pioneer’
                                             ‘The Last Days of Winter’
                                             ‘Rooms That Aren’t There’
                                             ‘The American Falls from Below’
                                             ‘You Promised me a Kingdom’







 13:00 (BST)        01/07/23       ‘The Stranger’ (III/III) 

In which the author reads ...

                                            • ‘Au Black’
                                            ‘Away on Business’
                                             ‘The Clouds that Pass’ 
                                             ‘The Avalanche’
                                             ‘Swept Up in the Wave’
                                             ‘The Bag Lady & La Fleurs du Mal
                                             ‘The Winged’
                                             ‘The Oneironaut & La Novillera’
                                             ‘The Thing in the Road’
                                             ‘The Land is Dark’
                                             ‘The Last Man to Qualify’
                                             ‘Thank You, Bye’
                                             ‘A Walk By the River’
                                            ‘The People in the Hotel’
                                             ‘The Palace at Midnight’











TEMPORARY PALACES was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle 
and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for broadcast on Resonance Extra, 
and recorded on locationin Resonance’s Bermondsey chapel studios,
London, accross two days in late, October, 2022.

Simone’s readings are accompanied
by found and borrowed sounds
and a musical accompaniment from
Jem Finer (℅ Thanet Tape Centre),
pooled together by Jaeckle.







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. Simone’s Tenement title, Palace of Rubble, is her first collection.






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& Resonance Extra

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