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. It is noted as being perhaps Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work,[citation needed] and is also one of the best-known experimental novels to be published during the 1960s.

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.
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, the first "postmodern" Canadian novel.