The Flame

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.

Named a Fall Read by Esquire, The Washington Post and Vanity Fair

The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.

A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.

“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”

Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”