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Beautiful Losers | 
| Author: Leonard Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.15
You Save: $6.80 (45%)
New (37) Used (29) from $7.44
Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 18339
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0679748253
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679748250
ASIN: 0679748253
Publication Date: November 2, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.
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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Challenging and Beautiful June 2, 2009
Brianna Cole
While Beautiful Losers is a fascinating read, it was not exactly a page turner for this reader. Yes, there are faults in my reading patterns, so I am sure that I should have gotten more from it, had I been able to concentrate fully... but this felt more like three hundred pages of poetry than it did a novel. Images were stunning, passages lyrical, images burned into my soul. Plot was convoluted and characters with only voice and little in the way of body filled the pages.
After my first experience with the authorship of Cohen, I will be sure to scour the used book store racks for more. I will buy them and hold them, and be ready to absorb myself in them fully before I take on the task of another of his books.
I like the challenge of books like this, but all readers should be ready to tackle the intricacies of Cohen before cracking one of his books. I'll be better prepared next time, I hope.
 Cohen at his best... February 4, 2009
Keri Van Zeyst (USA)
Beautiful Losers is a fluid and sensual, humorous and absurd, lofty yet grounded in it's own universal despair. It is also one of the most beautifully written books out there.
 not very good shape September 2, 2008
Thomas V. Burdick
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book was rated as very good condition, but it was yellow and soiled and not very good in my opinion.
If you act like you "get" all of this, you're a liar July 21, 2008
B. Joynt (PHILADELPHIA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Cohen throws us stuff he thinks of and puts it down and no one gets it but him, in this, well, instead of prosaic poem we've got a poetic prosaic work of literature and it's like... a long poem, but, it's not nearly as good as Cohen's poems, this book lacks, great ideas, injecting holy water, how great, he caught "them" doing it... how F is ruined by all of his sexual endeavors - there's great stuff here but having it written down in prosaic form does not allow it to be great. Cohen said recently, Pick it up at a certain spot if you want to - see, you don't even have to start from the beginning. I think it's amazing he did it, but at the same time, well, I just bought Cohen's new album, "Dear, Heather" - I don't want to hear songs about "Nine Eleven" - I feel their contrived, but when Cohen blatantly does it - "On that day" -
They hate us of old
Our women unveiled
Our slaves and our gold
I wouldn't know
I'm just holding the fort
But answer me this
I won't take you to court
Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day
On that day
They wounded New York
At his age, producing this brilliance shows that he'll go down in history as big as friggin' Plato.
A Searing & Ecstatic Vision September 14, 2006
J. Tudor (New York, NY USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
"Beautiful Losers" merges the profane with the sacred to create an unforgettable, disturbing and wildly elated vision. Using masterful stream-of-consciousness, Leonard Cohen breaks the barriers: nothing is off-limits, nothing is too precious, nothing is too spiritual. Everything, including all forms of erotic acts, will be desecrated on these pages: but none of the writing is gratuitous. With every blasphemous thought and image, we are drawn into an ecstatic spiritual quest, such that in the midst of an insanely orgasmic scene, replete with blood, violence, debilitating pleasure, we find this treasure:
("O Father, Nameless and Free of Description, lead me from the Desert of the Possible. Too long I have dealt with Events. Too long I labored to become an Angel. I chased Miracles with a bag of Power to salt their wild Tails. I tried to dominate Insanity so I could steal its Information. I tried to program the Computers with Insanity. I tried to create Grace to prove that Grace e isted. ... We could not see Evidence stretched our Memories. Dear Father, accept this confession: we did not train ourselves to Receive because we believed there wasn't Anything to Receive and we could not endure with this Belief.")
At the center of the novel is the unforgettable "F", the great iconoclast, the sexualist searching for the divine experience, the man who betrays with joy, who gives and receives pain with bliss, who howls out his darkness in a search for light.
Readers who relate to "Beautiful Losers" may also be open to "Miss MacIntosh My Darling", "Art and Lies", and (of course) Satre's "No Exit." Still, to see such roaring poetry and prose bundled into a novel is rare, and "Beautiful Losers" is one-of-a-kind.
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