"She considered her life: each aspect rested on another, was undercut by its arbitrary predecessor in a deconstructive chain leading back to the blank canvas, to defenseless impulse and unjustifiable whim. She felt seduced by despair, felt a void opening before her; what was this void? The apparition of suicide, the specter of her own death? No, it was the nothingness stretching forever beneath the seemingly concrete aspects of her existence, the eternal blank canvas upon which she had enacted her life (and to which she would eventually return)..." - from The Sirens The interconnected lives and trials of five characters - an Artist, a Seeker, a Seductress, a Dreamer, and an Academic - comprise a novel within this novel, while their author's struggle to achieve his lofty artistic vision forms the framing drama in this unconventional and experimental story of ambition, inspiration, and obsession. The novel's unnamed narrator has failed: the promise of his youth has been spent and ruined, and he fears that he will never achieve the great work of which he - and others - imagined him capable. It is only through a chance encounter with a strange and beautiful woman - a woman who seems to know more about him and his troubles than she should - that he feels himself newly inspired, capable of the ambitious work he once envisioned. But who is this muse, and towards what is she leading him? And what will he discover, when the quest for true expression lures him ever deeper into his own scarred and fractured mind? Written by Stavros Stavros Cover design by Tom Maven