Beautiful Losers

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. 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. In 1966, the CBC called Beautiful Losers "one of the most radical and extraordinary works of...