A Ballet of Lepers - Leonard Cohen

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Résumé :

• Leonard Cohen’s last book, The Flame, was published posthumously in 2018 by FSG. It was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times and Daily Mail. It has sold over 50,000 copies in all formats and is backlisting steadily.
• A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories collects some of Cohen’s earliest never-before-published work, including a new novel he remarked was “probably a better novel” than his widely celebrated 1963 book A Favourite Game. The collection also includes short stories and a radio play, all of which explore themes that would resonate in Cohen’s work over the course of his career, including desire, shame, and longing.

• The Paris Review is running an excerpt from A Ballet of Lepers in the Summer 2022 issue, and is also publishing short essays on Cohen online by writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Nell Zink, and Andrew Martin: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/on-leonard-cohen/. BOMB Magazine will also be running a first serial of the story “Polly” in their Fall issue. 

• The announcement of Grove’s publication has already received eager early interest. The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Literary Hub reported the announcement, and it was prominently featured in Publishers Lunch’s Daily Deals. We are also expecting a Publishers Weekly write-up shortly.
• The collection consists of manuscripts from Cohen’s archive, gathered here together for the first time. Like our publication of Burroughs and Kerouac’s collaborative novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the publication of A Ballet of Lepers is both a literary event and an incomparable artifact.
• With this book, Cohen joins the Grove list for the first time, where he finds himself in the company of many of the Beat writers whom he most admired, including Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg.
• Cohen was born in Canada in 1934 and passed away in Los Angeles in November 2016 to international mourning. We are publishing this new book in October 2022 in advance of the seventh anniversary of the year of his death and expect to do outreach to fan organizations and consider participation in events honoring his life.
• We are publishing A Ballet of Lepers simultaneously with McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Canongate in the UK.