Alena
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Narrated by:
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Carla Mercer-Meyer
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By:
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Rachel Pastan
About this listen
At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It's been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk's chief curator, Augustin's childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier's original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance - and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.
The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past - a past obsessively preserved by the museum's business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator's efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements.
When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena's death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface. Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.
©2014 Rachel Pastan (P)2014 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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A must-read for every woman
- By Julie W. Capell on 05-06-16
By: Sylvia Plath
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Shadow Show
- All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
- By: Sam Weller - editor, Mort Castle - editor
- Narrated by: George Takei, Edward Herrmann, Kate Mulgrew, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT RAY BRADBURY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-27-17
By: Sam Weller - editor, and others
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Lighthouse Bay
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This breathtaking novel travels more than a century between two love stories set in the Australian seaside town of Lighthouse Bay. In 1901, a ship sinks off the coast of Lighthouse Bay in Australia. The only survivor is Isabella Winterbourne - escaping her loveless marriage and the devastating loss of her son - who clutches a priceless gift meant for the Australian Parliament. Suddenly, this gift could be her ticket to a new life, free from the bonds of her husband and his overbearing family.
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Excellent story!
- By Kate B. on 11-30-17
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The Boy Who Drew Monsters
- By: Keith Donohue
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire.
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troubled boy, troubled waters
- By Debra B on 10-29-14
By: Keith Donohue
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Black & White
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to 14. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart.
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It was okay
- By Lucy7 on 02-13-19
By: Dani Shapiro
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Stations of the Tide
- By: Michael Swanwick
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
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Hard to categorize, hard to put down
- By Robert L. on 03-25-12
By: Michael Swanwick
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The Seduction of Water
- By: Carol Goodman
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For Iris, he sudden impulse to write a piece about her mother leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime - and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother's death, a strange, untimely end in a fire 30 years ago. When Iris returns to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother's biography and search for her mother's missing manuscript, she unravels a haunting mystery that threatens to envelope her.
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Disapointing
- By Susan Delaney on 02-19-09
By: Carol Goodman
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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Revenge
- Eleven Dark Tales
- By: Yoko Ogawa
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith, Johanna Parker
- Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor - who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture.
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Maybe, more Gray then Dark?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 10-28-14
By: Yoko Ogawa
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Swimming at Night
- By: Lucy Clarke
- Narrated by: Fiona Hardingham
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Katie’s world is shattered by the news that her headstrong, bohemian younger sister Mia has been found dead at the bottom of a cliff in Bali. The authorities say Mia jumped - that her death was a suicide. Although they hadn’t spoken since Mia suddenly left on an around-the-world trip six months earlier, Katie refuses to accept that her sister would take her own life. Distraught that they never made peace, she leaves behind her orderly life in London and embarks on a journey to find the truth.
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Meanders too much
- By Delah on 05-22-13
By: Lucy Clarke
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The October Country
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Haunting, harrowing, and downright horrifying, this classic collection from the modern master of the fantastic features: "The Small Assassin": a fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother's dream come true - or her nightmare.... "The Emissary": the faithful dog was the sick boy's only connection with the world outside - and beyond.... "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone": a most remarkable case of murder - the deceased was delighted! And more!
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The October Country
- By steven richard pohl on 09-17-19
By: Ray Bradbury
What listeners say about Alena
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Samantha
- 01-25-15
Over written and very slow.
Had to listen to then end. But really not very plausible relationship between the characters and very over written. Very slow moving novel.
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- Stefan
- 03-25-14
The wrong reader for this book!
The reader's juvenile tone and unfamiliarity with the art world was a real mismatch with this novel. Almost every significant artist's name was badly mispronounced, completely undermining the believability of the characters.
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- likestoknit
- 04-26-14
Please have pronunciation of foreign names vetted.
What did you like best about Alena? What did you like least?
I'm still listening to this and am curious how the iteration of Rebecca will play out. I am unpleasantly distracted by the mispronunciation of Italian names. Giotto is correctly pronounced Jotto, NOT Gee-otto.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-24-14
I Wanted to Like this Book
Any additional comments?
I love museums. I wanted to love this book but the "new" curator was just too naive and such a push over. I finally had to stop listening or throw my Kindle against the wall.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Michael McConnell
- 08-07-14
So far, I'm having a problem with the narrator
What disappointed you about Alena?
I'm about 5 hours in, and in spite of my disappointment that, so far, ALENA is more of a tepid, often clumsy REBECCA retell (rather the homage I was hoping for), I plan to give Ms. Pastan the benefit of the doubt and read on. The big disappointment is in the performance by Carla Mercer-Meyer, and not just because I find her speaking voice grating and inexpressive. Like the book this one so closely shadows, much of the plot hangs on the unworldly nature of its unnamed main character (who is also its narrator), but in ALENA, that character is a young woman with a graduate degree in art history whose career goal is to be the curator of an art museum. It is very difficult for me to believe, however, that after six years of studying the European masters, a trip to Venice to kick off the main plot of the book plus a number of years between then and the now of the book in close association with a man whose background is anything but unworldly and who has spent a lifetime in cross-cultural navigation with great success, and our narrator as performed by Ms. Mercer-Meyer can get no closer to a passable pronunciation of the Italian master fresco artist's name than Gee-OH-TOE? Really? And it's not as if that is the only gaffe. There are scores of them. We hear reference after reference to the art and artists (and their cultures) this woman is supposed to have studied, but either through inept direction or natural ignorance, the total absence of any attempt to make is seem as if she has even a passing aural acquaintance with any language other than her own American English makes credibility practically impossible, and (is it obvious) is coloring to a major extent my 'enjoyment' of the reading.
What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)
I'll let you know.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
I'm pretty sure I've already covered that question. See above.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
It has held my interest to the extent that, in spite of the dreadful narrator, I'm forging on.
Any additional comments?
Maybe later.
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1 person found this helpful