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.
"A funny, bleak, brutal, Dante-style guide to a posthumous world of artistic failures".
James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic, author of Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another)
"Valliard proffers a rare and valuable curiosity, a wunderkammer of creative impediments, blockages, cul-de-sacs and subconscious stopcocks. The City of Lost Intentions stylishly fills a lacuna you never even knew existed. This would have been a classic 200 years ago, and will still have currency 200 years hence. Elegant and erudite, whimsical and wondrous, handsomely produced, if you cannot find yourself within this bestiary you need to work harder. If it was merely an exercise in eccentricity it would still provide amusement, but it is deceptively perceptive: writers and other artists will find it reveals more about our processes than we may want to admit."
Michael Winkler (author of Grimmish)
"Sublimely weird and brilliant."
Louis Barabbas (composer and lyricist, Coraline: The Musical)