Audiobooks by Leonard Cohen

The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings

This program is read by Margaret Atwood, Rodney Crowell, John Doe, Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Maggie Hoffman, Ross Marquand, Will Patton, Seth Rogen, Michael Shannon, and Neela Vaswani. The Flame is the final collection of the seminal musician and poet, which he was determined to complete before his death. Just weeks before his death in late 2016, Leonard Cohen told The New Yorker that he was ready for the end to come. He just wanted enough time to put his last book in order. Fortunately, that time was granted. The Flame is Cohen's eloquent farewell, a valedictory collection of lyrics and poems that maps his singular creative journey. As noted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's citation, "For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song-his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core." In addition to new poems about war, desire, regrets, lamb chops, and hummingbirds, and lyrics from his last three albums, including the chart-topping "You Want It Darker," The Flame includes carefully selected excerpts from Cohen's voluminous notebooks, which he kept faithfully over the years. Listeners will hear about the subjects that have always preoccupied Cohen: the dimensions of love, the secret code of existence, and the hope for transcendence in a broken world. In the words of Cohen's longtime manager and friend, Robert Kory, The Flame "reveals to all the intensity of his inner fire" to the end.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Ari Fliakos, Jim Fletcher, John Doe, Maggie Hoffman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Shannon, Neela Vaswani, Rodney Crowell, Seth Rogen, Will Patton (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Flame

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker. An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen's lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who has plumbed the depths of our darkest questions and come up wanting, yearning for more.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Michael Sheen, Seth Rogen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Book of Longing

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Book of Longing written and read by Leonard Cohen. Book of Longing is Leonard Cohen's first book of new poetry since Book of Mercy was published two decades ago. It collects Cohen's poetry written between the 1980s and 2006, when this book was first published. Book of Longing demonstrates the range and depth of Cohen's work, revealing an extraordinary gift of language that speaks with rare clarity, passion and timelessness. 'Awe-inspiring. . . Cohen emerges as the wry, sensual mystic his champions have always known he was' Sunday Telegraph 'Exceptional. Clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound. . . as soulful a credo as he has ever put on paper' New York Times 'Cohen maps this wasteland of the heart with humour, and sometimes anger' Independent

Leonard Cohen (Author), Leonard Cohen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Book of Mercy

Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now available on audio for the first time, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt, and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

Audiobook

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

With the appearance of his first record album in 1967, Leonard Cohen-already well known in his native Canada as a poet and novelist-was introduced to audiences in the United States, where he quickly took his place among the preeminent singer-songwriters of the time. Over the years, and through the release of more than a dozen studio albums, Cohen gained a reputation as a dazzlingly literate and consistently daring songwriter. His status as a cult artist grew and solidified, not only in North America but all across Europe; singers of enormously diverse styles recorded his songs; his influence could be charted in every new wave of recording artists that followed his emergence. In 1988 the release of his album I'm Your Man thrust him back into the mainstream spotlight-his last three albums all hit the top twenty charts in the United States, and even after his death in 2016, fans continue to appreciate the musical legacy he left behind. Now Stranger Music brings together, for the first time in one volume, a generous selection of Leonard Cohen's song lyrics and poetry. Stranger Music reveals the range and depth of Cohen's work. And it is a long-overdue celebration of his extraordinary gift for language that speaks with rare clarity, passion, and timelessness.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Favorite Game: A Novel

In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal.Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling color-a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labor but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

Audiobook

Beautiful Losers

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen's most defiant and uninhibited work.As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy-and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for three hundred years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.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.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Bronson Pinchot, John Lescault, Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook