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.
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.
By A. VALLIARD
AVAILABLE NOW
for $25AUD/£ 12
with
FREE AUS/UK SHIPPING (until it becomes untenable)
Books bought by antipodeans will be packed by an idle publisher and sent by Australia Post. UK orders will be drop-shipped from UK printer. Other international orders, please see below!
BOOKSELLERS: We offer a trade discount of 45% the RRP of $25AUD, drop-shipped directly from our printer’s UK/US/AUS facilities. Contact us!
Alternatively, read EXCERPTS of the Eternal Carnations, the Denizens of the City.
Please note! Multiple copies are sold for $15 each. So, 1 for $25, 2 for $40, 3 for $55 etc. Do bear this in mind, should you wish to buy a copy to antagonise an artist friend.
WHERE TO ACQUIRE:
IRELAND
THE SECRET BOOK AND RECORD STORE
15A Wicklow St, Dublin
UK
BLACKWELL'S (Fastest & ships internationally)
EUROPE
DUSSMANN DAS KULTURKAUFHAUS (Germany)
ADLIBRIS (Sweden)
AMERICA & CANADA
Please buy from the splendid Tertulia, currently offering 20% - %50 discount & free shipping. Use code “CITY”
Or
POWELL'S
Ideally, ask at your local bookshop if they might order it in for you, and thus support the dwindling, Amazon-ravaged, independent bookseller ecosystem.
AUSTRALIA
SYDNEY:
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
Online:
THIS WEBSITE, if you'd be so kind!
REST OF WORLD
Contact us! We’ll see what we can wrangle.
As the book begins to show its baroque and wretched face in a variety of locations, we will update this list accordingly.
An Ebook is also available from all the usual suspects. It is considerably less ornamented and arguably easier to read, if one prefers such things.
