![]() ![]() ![]() Six years after his death, this work is the centerpiece of a new collection of juvenilia compiled by the scholar Alexandra Pleshoyano, who also co-edited Cohen’s previous posthumous book, “The Flame.” “A Ballet of Lepers” sets the longer title piece alongside 15 short stories and one radio playscript, all written between 19, when Cohen was in his 20s. In 1963, four years before his first album, a promising young poet named Leonard Cohen released his debut novel, “The Favorite Game.” Jack McClelland, the Canadian publisher who’d enthusiastically issued Cohen’s second poetry collection, “The Spice-Box of Earth,” initially declined to put out the evocative yet disorderly bildungsroman he felt it was marred by the egotism of a “first novel.” Cohen responded that the book was actually “a third novel disguised as a first” though he hadn’t published them, by then he had already begun “Famous Havana Diary,” which he would never finish, and completed “A Ballet of Lepers,” which he once said was “probably a better novel” than “The Favorite Game.” But despite Cohen’s best efforts, it never appeared during his lifetime. ![]() A BALLET OF LEPERS: A Novel and Stories, by Leonard Cohen ![]()
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