Stained Glass Elegies

shūsaku endō van c. gessel

The acclaimed short stories of the master Japanese writer. The arresting beauty of Shusaku Endo's fiction is best known in the West through his highly acclaimed novels The Samurai and Silence . His consummately wrought short stories, with their worlds of deep shadows and achieved clarity, are less familiar. The dozen stories of Stained Glass Elegies , selected by the author together with his translator, display the full range of Endo's talents in short fiction.

Genres short storiesjapanfictionjapanese literatureliteraturenovelsliterary fiction

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1986

This edition

Format: 170 pages, Paperback
Published: October 17, 1990 by New Directions
ISBN: 9780811211420
ASIN: 0811211428
Language: English

About the author

shūsaku endō

Shusaku Endo (遠藤周作), born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian and Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize.
(from the backcover of Volcano).