The City of Lost Intentions

A Guide for the Artistically Waylaid

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.

The cover of The City of Lost Intentions as displayed on a mobile, a kindle, and a paperback book.

By A. VALLIARD

A book for all waylaid artists and self-saboteurs.

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.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews and inebriated discussions with writers, actors, painters, directors, musicians, cabaret performers, glassblowers, sartorialists, photographers, philosophers, comedians, 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 mixture of The Little Prince, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and some kind of weird hermetic esoteric text from the 1600s.”

~ Ben Lindner (Beyond the Zero Podcast)

NOTE: Sydney/Brisbane folk, if only seeking one copy please buy from the bookshops below! It will cost the same as a single book + shipping from us, and will support the dwindling, Amazon-ravaged, independent bookseller ecosystem.