As imagined by Leonard Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In the hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual More ... fantasy- and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for all of 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. §First published in 1996, "Beautiful Losers" demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.