September 15: Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress in Conversation with Alicia Kismet Eler

Sirens & Muses

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Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York City in this magnificent debut for fans of Writers & Lovers and The Goldfinch.

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. 

About The Author:

Antonia Angress was born in Los Angeles and raised in San José, Costa Rica. She is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Minnesota MFA program, where she was a Winifred Fiction Fellow and a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, the artist Connor McManus. SIRENS & MUSES is her first novel.

Alicia Kısmet Eler (she/they) is an arts journalist, critic and writer. She is the author of The Selfie Generation and is currently the visual art critic/reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for the breaking news reporting of George Floyd’s killing. Their work has been published in The Guardian, New York Magazine, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. Her fiction, which has appeared in Queen Mobs Teahouse and Projecttile Lit, investigates sexuality, second-generation immigrant experiences, and the Turkish diaspora. Alicia grew up in Chicago and is currently based in Minneapolis. She is at work on a novel.