PALACE OF RUBBLE
Palace of Rubble is a collection of one-page stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources. Written under constraint in the tradition of Oulipo, these hybrid works of prose are reconstructions that no longer resemble the original texts, yet draw from the same reservoir of vocabulary to convey new images and ideas, while preserving some distant ember of the universe from which they were first generated. Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Saddam Hussein’s demolished palaces printed on the cover of a newspaper Simone found discarded on a café table during the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Palace of Rubble has since evolved into an accumulation of texts invoked by a historical moment spanning the eras of Bush, Obama, Trump, and into the present day. 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, it chronicles a vivid landscape of crumbling towers and heart-broken animals, eclipses, comets, and lovers in abandoned rooms, still searching for beauty amidst the ruins of the catastrophe bequeathed to them.
Accompanying the texts is a selection of photographs by John Divola.
PRAISE FOR PALACE OF RUBBLE
“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 recognizable, 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
“Kyra Simone’s prose is a blowtorch of liberation.”
—Filip Marinovich, author of Wolfman Librarian