Beautiful Losers

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

Beautiful Losers
Paperback edition of Beautiful Losers
Author(s)	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
OCLC Number	28065898
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Classification	PR9199.3.C57 B4 1993
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. Cohen wrote the novel while living on the Greek Island of Hydra.

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.

Critical Response

In 1966, the CBC called Beautiful Losers "one of the most radical and extraordinary works of fiction ever published in Canada," and quoted a critic from the Boston Globe who positively compared the work with the fiction of James Joyce. However, they also quote from a negative review in which the critic Robert Fulford called Beautiful Losers "the most revolting book ever written in Canada."