Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen
2 Rating(s)
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Beautiful Losers

Author: Leonard Cohen

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki, Bronson Pinchot, John Lescault

Unabridged: 8 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/24/2018

Synopsis

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.

About Leonard Cohen

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.

About Stefan Rudnicki

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.

About Bronson Pinchot

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.

About John Lescault

Patrick Cullen (a.k.a. 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by karen on June 23, 2018

worst day ever. thanks for all the everything, l.c. i have tried to review this book on four separate occasions. for some reason, this is one of the most diffcult books for me to defend to others and to justify to myself. on the one hand, it's leonard cohen. enough said. on the other hand, i can be obj......more

Goodreads review by Paul on December 01, 2007

Okay, this book is mental, and proves Laughing Leonard not just to be the Grocer of Despair as his detractors may have unkindly phrased it, but capable of impressive rudeness and high humour. And then you get exquisite prose poems like the following, which the great Buffy Sainte-Marie extracted and......more

Goodreads review by Lorenzo on February 27, 2016

I used to have a problem with Leonard Cohen. He gave me headache. This has to be explained. When I was 5 years old my mum was a teacher in a small nursery school somewhere on the mountains. Having not the money for hiring a babysitter and being myself more or less the same age of her schoolkids I was j......more

Goodreads review by Curtis on May 07, 2009

Decadently filthy, obtuse and unrelenting, Beautiful Losers is characteristically unlike the Leonard Cohen of the early 1960s. Rather than the rhythmic, dulcet poetry and lyrics, the novel is of dense prose that more resembles the beat poetry of Kesey or Ginsberg, encapsulating the loose spirit and......more

Goodreads review by Debs on April 19, 2008

I don't know what the hell to say about this book. So I'll talk about the feelings. Sometimes, I had to shut it because it was too nauseating. Sometimes I thought it was delicious, and disgusting. Sometimes my thoughts ran in parallel with it. At one point I declared that it was the best book in all......more

Quotes

“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

Awards

  • AudioFile Editors’ Pick
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