Beautiful Losers

Beautiful Losers is a novel by Canadian novelist, poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Published in 1966, it was his second novel. 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 chosen and originally to be championed by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright; tour commitments meant that Wainright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson.

At the centre of the novel are the members of a love triangle, united by their obsessions and fascination with a mythic seventeenth-century Mohawk saint, 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.

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