Beautiful Losers is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...

. Published in 1966

1966 in literature

The year 1966 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*February 14 - Dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky are sentenced to hard labour for "anti-Soviet activity"....

 by McClelland and Stewart

McClelland and Stewart

McClelland & Stewart Limited is a Canadian publishing company. It is partially owned by Random House of Canada, now a subsidiary of Bertelsmann....

, it was the Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 novelist-poet

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

's second novel, and precedes his career as a singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...

. 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

2005 in literature

The year 2005 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*February 25 - Canada Reads selects Rockbound by Frank Parker Day as the novel to be read across the nation....

 edition of Canada Reads

Canada Reads

Canada Reads is an annual "battle of the books" competition organized and broadcast by Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC.-Overview:During Canada Reads, five personalities champion five different books, each champion extolling the merits of one of the titles. The debate is broadcast over a series...

, where it was originally to be read by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright

Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. He has recorded six albums of original music, EPs, and tracks on compilations and film soundtracks.-Early years:...

, though tour commitments meant that Wainwright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson

Molly Johnson

Molly Johnson, OC is a Canadian Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter of pop and jazz.-Biography:Johnson began as a child performer, receiving formal training from the National Ballet School and the Banff School of Fine Arts...

.

Plot summary

At the centre of the novel are the members of a love triangle

Love triangle

A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...

, united by their obsessions and fascination with a seventeenth-century Mohawk

Mohawk nation

Mohawk are the most easterly tribe of the Iroquois confederation. They call themselves Kanien'gehaga, people of the place of the flint...

, Blessed

Beatification

Beatification is a recognition accorded by the Catholic Church of a dead person's entrance into Heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his or her name . Beatification is the third of the four steps in the canonization process...

 Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha or Catherine Tekakwitha was a Mohawk-Algonquian woman from New York and an early convert to Catholicism, who has been beatified in the Roman Catholic Church.-Her life:...

. 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.

The novel is sometimes coarse, rhapsodic and bitingly witty, as it explores the particular brand of self-abandonment each character adopts, whereby the sensualist becomes indistinguishable from the saint. Beautiful Losers is considered a masterpiece of Canadian literature, and, according to Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon, O.C. is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian Studies. Hutcheon describes her herself as "intellectually promiscuous", as she brings a cross-disciplinary approach to her work She is University Professor in the Department of...

, the first "post-modern" Canadian novel.