The lives of four artists are forever altered by the desires protests and ambitions that lure
and unsettle them in this magnetic novel. It's 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy
Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art students paint and sculpt in
a rarified bubble dreaming only of disproving the notion that in art everything has already
been done. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to
Wrynn as a scholarship student but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes
novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa's unexpected attraction to her charismatic
roommate Karina Piontek the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art
collectors. Gradually Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic
relationship one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also
can't shake her fascination with Preston Utley a senior and anti-capitalist Internet
provocateur publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Belfer-a
once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain cultural relevance and perhaps a spotlight.
When Preston concocts an explosive hoax the fates of all four artists are upended as each is
unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new
identities in art in society and amongst each other. In the process they must find either
their most authentic terms of life-of success failure and joy-or risk losing themselves
altogether. With mesmerizing grace and earnest beauty Sirens & Muses wrestles with questions
of selfhood and ambition art and protest and new love. At the same time with a canny
critical eye the novel upends notions of class money art youth and a generation's fight to
own their future--
