Jeffrey Lewis - Böcker

An old shoe factory in a costal New England town is up for sale again. When a private equity mogul with a fondness for the factory’s shoes buys it, he sets in motion a story with profound implications for the way we live today. The people of Bealport depend on Norumbega. Their livelihoods, their self-respect and their interconnectedness are all at stake. The shadow of the factory’s fate looms over the people of the town. Idiosyncratic and humane, the cast is the kind that small communities under threat produce. Bealport is a portrait of a place, at once sympathetic, mordant, unsparing, comic, tragic and universal, and of a way of life that is passing. It is a novel of a town, and to no small degree of every town in America and beyond.

The Leonard Cohen at the center of Leonard Cohen: A Novel is an everyman, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure, yet a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in particular, to write one song as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen's songs. At the center of Leonard's life is Daphne. In their meeting on a Greek island, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out. But even with Daphne, Leonard is shadowed by the "other" Leonard Cohen, whom he fears is the real Apollo. The ancient myth haunts the fated lovers, and the “nobody” Leonard Cohen’s life becomes at once a mystery, a miracle, and a myth on its own terms. Once upon a time, Apollo fell hard for Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree. No less a fate awaits the protagonists of this slender yet universal novel, where art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.