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Shop nowAlena
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Learn moreAt 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.
Rachel Pastan's novel Alena was named an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of two other novels, Lady of the Snakes and This Side of Married, which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her short fiction has been published in the Georgia Review, the Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. In 2014 she edited Seven Writers, a chapbook of writing inspired by exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she served as editor-at-large for several years and developed the popular blog Miranda. Pastan grew up in suburban Maryland, the daughter of a molecular geneticist and a poet, and attended Harvard College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writers Seminar MFA program. Up until recently, she taught writing at Swarthmore College and now is the editor of the Swathmorean, a small town newspaper.
Carla Mercer-Meyer, a Southern California native, has a strong musical theater background, as she has been performing her entire life. Her credits include a guest appearance on The Morris Taylor Show and her performances include Into the Woods, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and many other theatrical productions. An AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator, Carla resides in Southern California with her husband and four children. She is an avid audiobook listener and a book fanatic.