The City of Lost Intentions

A Compendium of Fallibility, a Bestiary of Artistic Fears & Foibles, and an unhelpful travel guide to the City of Lost Intentions, with particular notice paid to its denizens—the transmogrified souls of self-damned artists—for the benefit of the prospective resident as they negotiate the underworld metropolis in the dubious company of Montcorbier, a disaffected psychopomp.

Being a baroque phantasmagoria of an imaginary hell, passing through its theatres, gilded grottoes, and stagnant, underground seas, from the Temple of Fo-Elpmet-Eht to the Hoarse Latitudes, with each chapter devoted to a different crime against the artist's Heart.

 Presenting as a collection of 151 vignettes of the infernal citizens, linked by the erratic actions of the guide, Montcorbier, and the increasingly despairing and cryptic interjections of an unknown narrator who derails the careful catalogue of the city’s populace with complaints about the mysterious and despised Architect.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews and inebriated discussions with actors, painters, writers, directors, musicians, cabaret performers, glassblowers, fashion designers, photographers, philosophers, stand-up comics, and indeed anyone of a creative bent, over nine countries and ten years, concerning ways in which the artist might betray their art, The City of Lost Intentions is a tragicomical fairy tale of the tyranny of “the Vision”.

A book for all waylaid artists and self-saboteurs!

WHERE TO ACQUIRE:

AUSTRALIA

SYDNEY:

In store at:

Berkelouw Books (Paddington) ~ SYDNEY

Better Read Than Dead Bookstore ~ SYDNEY

Modern Times Bookshop ~ SYDNEY

Gleebooks ~ SYDNEY

Readings (Carlton) ~ MELBOURNE

Avid Reader ~ BRISBANE

IRELAND 

THE SECRET BOOK AND RECORD STORE

15A Wicklow St, Dublin

UK

BLACKWELL'S

WATERSTONES

FOYLES

THE ABOMINABLE RIVER (Fastest, but, you know, abominable)

EUROPE

The eclectic delight of HAUS NOSTROMO!  (Germany)

THE ABOMINABLE RIVER (France)

ADLIBRIS (Sweden)

AMERICA & CANADA

Please buy from the splendid Tertulia (which offers 50% discount if you join, incidentally)

TERTULIA

Or via the usual options, including:

THE LAST BOOKSTORE

MAGERS & QUINN BOOKSELLERS

BARNES & NOBLE

Ideally, ask at your local bookshop if they might order it in for you, and thus support the dwindling, Amazon-ravaged, independent bookseller ecosystem.