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Sirens & Muses
Cover of Sirens & Muses
Sirens & Muses
A Novel
Borrow Borrow
Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York in this “gripping, provocative, and supremely entertaining” (BuzzFeed) debut
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree • “Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

 
FINALIST FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour, PopSugar, Debutiful
 
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 rarefied bubble. 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, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.   
  
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 among 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 a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.
Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York in this “gripping, provocative, and supremely entertaining” (BuzzFeed) debut
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree • “Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

 
FINALIST FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour, PopSugar, Debutiful
 
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 rarefied bubble. 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, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.   
  
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 among 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 a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.
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  • From the cover Part One

    Chapter One


    Louisa’s first assignment at Wrynn College of Art was paint home. She’d left home twelve days ago, and now, as she looked out the classroom window, it startled her still to see hills and sullen, huddled townhouses, the New England sky close and cold, nothing like at home, where the sky overwhelmed the land, a drama of clouds and rain and strange shafts of tawny light.

    She’d never been on her own before. Her year at South Louisiana Community College didn’t count. She had slept in her old bedroom, borrowed her mother’s car to get to class, worked the same shifts at Chez Jacqueline, eaten Sunday dinner at Grandma and Pepere’s.

    Louisa was homesick. It was normal, she told herself. Even at nineteen-almost-twenty, it was normal. And so, alone in her studio, she’d cried a little as she painted Lake Martin at dusk, bald cypresses echoed by their dark reflections in the water. It was a placid scene, but ominous, tinged with danger, curdled at the edges like a faded bruise. In the background, low, swollen clouds gleamed with uncanny clarity and a flutter of pintails took off over the marsh. In the foreground, an ibis waded in the shallows, its bow-shaped beak slicing through the water. Its plumage was a soft, unglossed white, except for its black wingtips. Its pearly blue eye met the viewer’s.

    She’d chosen an ibis because Grandma had once told her that it symbolized resilience; it was the last animal to take shelter before a hurricane, and the first to reappear after the storm.

    “No, not resilience,” Mom had said, overhearing. “Regeneration. And wisdom.”

    Danger, Louisa thought. Optimism.

    “Dinner,” Pepere added. Hunting ibises was illegal, but he’d grown up shooting them for the table and occasionally still brought one home. The meat was orange and fishy.

    Now, a thousand miles away from him, Louisa stood alone in an empty classroom. She’d arrived early to secure a spot on the southern wall, and she was pleased with how her painting looked there, bathed in that diffuse northern light, what Mom called painterly light. One window was cracked to let in a breeze, but the room still smelled sharply of oils and turpentine. Afternoon sun gilded the floorboards. As Louisa’s classmates arrived and hung their work, she turned to the wall and ran her fingers over the thumbtack holes. The other sophomores all knew one another already, had spent Foundation Year together, and in their presence, Louisa felt furiously shy.

    Maureen walked in, a manila folder under her arm. All professors went by their first names at Wrynn, which did nothing to make Maureen less formidable. Though her wardrobe consisted entirely of overlarge T-shirts and paint-stained cargo pants, the pockets full of jangly objects, she carried herself with the pugnacious confidence Louisa occasionally saw in certain older women who’d stopped caring what the world thought of them.

    “Everyone ready?” said Maureen. She opened the folder. “We’ll go alphabetically this time. Louisa Arceneaux, you’re up.” She pronounced it Are-SEE-necks.

    “ARE-sin-no,” Louisa corrected her softly. “It’s French.” She shifted so she was standing next to her painting with her back to the wall. She hugged her sketchbook to her chest as her classmates, all fifteen of them, gathered in a semicircle. Only Maureen brought a chair, its legs squeaking against the floor. She set it in front of Louisa’s painting and sat down, crossing her arms.

    There was a long silence, her...
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from May 16, 2022
    A quartet of artists negotiate love, ambition, and politics during the 2011 Occupy movement in Angress’s winning debut. Nineteen-year-old Louisa Arceneaux is a new transfer student at the fictional Wrynn College in New England, arriving from her native Louisiana. Her roommate, the icy and beautiful Karina Piontek, is everything Louisa is not: worldly, wealthy, and confident. Preston Utley, a senior, questions the school’s relevance in the modern age. The yin to Utley’s yang is Robert Berger, a teacher whose own art career, once white-hot, has atrophied. Angress nimbly embodies each of her characters, allowing her exceptional storytelling abilities to shine. When Louisa asks Karina to pose for a painting, the initial reticence between the two fades, and something more volatile emerges. Preston and Karina begin a romantic relationship on unequal footing, while Preston, a member of the school’s Occupy group, antagonizes an increasingly desperate Robert by excoriating his work in Artforum, and the novel’s first part ends with a major rupture. In part two, set over the following year, the characters have left Wrynn’s bubble for New York City, where Preston and Karina prepare for a joint debut show at Robert’s former gallery, and Angress sweeps everything toward a wonderfully complex conclusion. This is a standout. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

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Sirens & Muses
A Novel
Antonia Angress
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