Beautiful Losers

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This article is about the book by Leonard Cohen. For the film/art exhibit, see Beautiful Losers (film).
Beautiful Losers

Paperback edition of Beautiful Losers
Author Leonard Cohen
Cover artist Suan Mitchell and Lee Friedman
Country Canada
Language English
Genre(s) experimental novel; literary fiction
Publisher Vintage; Reissue edition (November 2, 1993)
Publication date 1966
Published in
English
1966
Pages 256 pages
ISBN 978-0679748250
Preceded by The Favourite Game

Beautiful Losers is a novel by Leonard Cohen. Published in 1966 by McClelland and Stewart, it was the Canadian novelist-poet's second novel, and precedes his career as a singer-songwriter. It is noted as being perhaps Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work, and is also one of the best-known experimental novels to be published during the 1960s.

Beautiful Losers was one of the selected novels in the 2005 edition of Canada Reads, where it was originally to be read by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, though tour commitments meant that Wainright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson.

[edit] Plot summary

At the centre of the novel are the members of a love triangle, united by their obsessions and fascination with a seventeenth-century Mohawk blessed, Kateri Tekakwitha. The triangle is made up of the unnamed narrator, an authority on the vanishing A------ tribe, his wife Edith, one of the last surviving members of the tribe, and their maniacal and domineering friend, F, who may or may not exist.

The novel is sometimes coarse, rhapsodic and bitingly witty, as it explores the particular brand of self-abandonment each character adopts, whereby the sensualist becomes indistinguishable from the saint. Beautiful Losers is considered a Canadian literature classic.

[edit] References

  • Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Second Edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997: 220-221. ISBN 0-19-541167-6
  • Canada Reads 2005