“Ingenious and a tad revolutionary..
“Like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleeepless Nights or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Leonard’s 52 Men is a novel of impressions unified by the author’s sensibility.” The Los Angeles Review of Books
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52 Men, Red Hen Press
Fiery World, Creative Process
Miss Me, VUP
Since You Ask, Akashic
A Place for My Devotion: a work in essays including The German Crowd (Subnivan) and Rumspringa (Gargoyle)
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Master, Poems, Simon Shieh
Goethe Dies, Thomas Bernhard
The Friend Seekers, Siamak Vossoughi
Scandanavia, Granta
Raising Abel (Christology) , James Alison
FORMER TITLES
The Other Mississippi , David Sansing
Writings, Eduardo Chillida
The Tanners, Robert Walser
New York, Paris, outback Australia; Manhattan, Mississippi, New Zealand, Germany. The treasure goes on gleaming in the dark (Maeterlinck).
My work begins with an exploration of family systems, then expands to systems in society.
These systems are creators of inequality sustained through various violences — large and small, physical and emotional, through war, scapegoating, denial and oppression.
How we endure and rise above these inequalities — through art and grace — is at the core of my nonfiction, novels and poems.
Loneliness – it takes us away from people. There’s no going on with our lives. We take the ax to them; we call the inspector to nail in the red X of the condemned. We become drifters, loiterers – filling up the world’s empty spaces, setting down phones in guest rooms, shared houses, cabins in the hinterlands. Plus: churches – we are in back pews, or discomfited in the ashram, lurking in the monastery.
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52 Men, a novel in crots
(Red Hen Press)
Featured in Tin House, The Rumpus, Fiction Advocate, the Creative Process and Gargoyle
With cameos by Lou Reed, Jay Carney, J Franzen, Michael Stipe, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper and Charlie Love of the Tangents
“Memory has a way of reducing people to their essence, like a piece of sea glass honed to a bright, beautiful nub. For Leonard, the statement is something like a literary ethos." LARB
Fiery World
“A beautiful story with a sexy twist”
A young girl in grief meets Acheron, the River of Woe from Hades. A fairytale set on Lake Ontario..,With the language of flowers, stories of girls turned into trees and reasons to believe.
Since You Ask, a Novel
(Akashic Books, New York, Stolista Press, Moscow)
Screenplay by C. Sandstett
Winner of the James Jones Award for a Best First Novel
“It saved my life.”
“An intense and insightful work about a childhod sexual abuse Survivor that portrays a complicated character and her multifaceted mind with deep empathy.”
Reviews in Booklist, Popwars, Rain Taxi, Stop Smiling, The Listener
Book of the Year, The Listener
Miss Me A Lot Of, a Novel Victoria University Press
World Famous In New Zealand
Finalist for the Prize in Modern Letters
Optioned for film
Excerpted in Best New Zealand Fiction 1 (Random House), The Listener
“Louise has perfect pitch for when you are young and in love and it is hopeless. She does it all perfectly.”
Laura Kroetsch, TVOne
Blood Is Blood, Poems
“Textured, wiry, tough and original, Leonard breaks all the rules.”
— Nicholas Christopher, Poetry Society of America