varoque books

Being a Compendium of Fallibility, a Bestiary of Artistic Fears and 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.

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 art, the book takes the form of a collection of vignettes of the infernal citizens, linked by the erratic actions of the dissipated 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’.

An absurdist handbook for all waylaid artists and self-saboteurs.