“Gorgeously written…One comes out of it having seen terrible and beautiful visions.” New York Times
Description
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work.
As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for three hundred years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.
Praise
“Gorgeously written…One comes out of it having seen terrible and beautiful visions.” New York Times
“Leaves one gasping for breath as well as suitable words…Cohen is a powerful, poetic writer.” Dallas Times-Herald
“Brilliant, explosive, a fountain of talent.” Boston Sunday Herald
Dubbed ‘an unstructured, free-form, irreverent novel’ by Library Journal‘s reviewer, Beautiful Losers seemed too strange even for the Sixties. Nevertheless, the book went on to become a cult hit, selling more than 400,000 copies before going out of print…[and] now being reissued…With its gay relationships, homages to Canadian Native Americans, and search for the meaning of life, this may now find wider acceptance in the mainstream.” Library JOurnal
Details
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Release Day | Jul 23, 2018 |
| Release Date | July 24, 2018 |
| Release Date Machine | 1532390400 |
| Imprint | Blackstone Publishing |
| Provider | Blackstone Publishing |
| Categories | Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fiction - All, Fiction - Adult |
Author Bio
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016), a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist, published two novels and eleven books of poetry and released fourteen studio albums. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011.
Narrator Bio
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
John Lescault, a native of Massachusetts, is a graduate of the Catholic University of America. He lives in Washington, DC, where he works in theater.
Overview
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work.
As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for three hundred years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.
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