introduction
Spring, the lonely other side
Love came
Things that cannot be said
Beautiful shade
The death I met
The stars are shining
Forgotten side road
Thinking of the Little Mermaid
The way to Geumseonsa Temple
mother
When the trip is over, I will tell others about it.
Her way of life
A time with them
Summer vacation spent in writing
On a snowy day
Hell of plain watercolors
Memories of alcohol
Another woman
Wansun's older sister's boots
people
The man who turned on the light in the darkness
Chagall's Village
One cloudy day
It doesn't come back now
When I sing, for some reason
There is someone I really admire
Become obsessed and sink to the bottom of life

I read this book, "Beautiful Shade," a collection of essays published at the age of thirty-three, at an airport on my way to Portugal late this spring.
Perhaps I should have packed this book in my bag for someone I was meeting in Lisbon.
I didn't have time to pick up anything else to read, so I ended up reading my own book, and my heart started to race.
It might have been because it was my first collection of prose.
This book contains all of my first thoughts about the world and literature…
I am grateful to have safely crossed the fifteen years and now wear new clothes like this.

_Shin Kyung-sook, Preface to the 3rd edition

“I never thought I would have a collection of essays so early.
“I’m only thirty-three.”
It was in 1995 that I published the book, so shyly.
"Beautiful Shade" is novelist Shin Kyung-sook's first collection of prose.

Perhaps it is because the reader's mindset has changed, but even though these writings were written a long time ago, they resonate even more today.
His writings make us once again confirm the place of Shin Kyung-sook's literature, which seems to have always been there, yet is deepening and broadening.
Through this collection of essays, which is imbued with the pain and memories of her childhood, upbringing, and early writing days, we are able to glimpse into the origins of the literary world and inner self of Shin Kyung-sook, a representative writer of the Korean literary world.


The pattern of deep and profound words, the allure of fragrant prose

Since Shin Kyung-sook began her literary career in 1985, when she won the Munye Joongang New Writer's Award for "Winter Fable," she has captivated the hearts of countless readers with her sensitive yet warm gaze that gazes into the empty abyss of existence, and her resonant prose that captures the subtle nuances of life.
If these novels of Shin Kyung-sook are the flowers and fruits of her literary world, then this collection of essays, which traces her aspirations and roots for literature, can be said to be the roots of Shin Kyung-sook's literature, which descends in search of the abyss of life and things, and the sap that rises through those roots.

"Beautiful Shade" is a veritable masterpiece of captivating prose and lyricism.
Shin Kyung-sook's unique and individual style reveals "things that cannot be put into words" in human language, "the separations that the author tried to live through but could not, the sorrows, the beauties, the things that have disappeared, the worlds beyond logic that cannot be reached by a scientific approach," and this, in turn, brings about "the desire to breathe life into anonymous beings that have already been crushed or that no one recognizes, the shadow of death that looms everywhere, the love that is helpless in the face of time, the clinging to the impossible, the longing for things that are not here," and reveals the history of a sensitive soul that wants to flexibly touch the essence of life and things, and "the dream of reproducing such things through writing."

In search of the origins of Shin Kyung-sook's literary world

In the stories of the families living in their hometown and the soil, the books, literature, and people he met, and the subtle movements of nature created by sunlight and wind, readers can naturally smell the author's eco-friendly sentiment and the scent of the countryside.
These memories of his hometown also influenced the author's literary view.
The author “constantly tried to express what he saw, heard, and felt.”
He himself said that what he writes are “footprints left behind by the truth of a time.
The more you try to lock it in, the more it breaks through.
Death that occurs simultaneously with birth.
The more I try to explain it, the more it falls apart.
The closer you get, the farther away you get.
It is an effort to visualize the intangible language of “unbearable but bearable.”
Readers can find the view of literature as 'literature as emotional stimulation' and 'an aesthetic experience that allows one to look at life from a different angle' throughout the collection of prose.

This collection of essays also provides a good opportunity to glimpse how the author's experiences were transformed into works and the gap between experiences and novels.
In the collection of essays, there are realistic confessions about death that appear in the short story collection “The Place Where the Organ Was” and the novel “A Lonely Room,” as well as the author’s original experience that continues from the short story “The Woman Playing Badminton” to the novel “Violet.”

In addition, the collection of essays contains stories from the author's practice days when he copied the works of Seo Jeong-in, Choi In-hun, Kim Seung-ok, Lee Je-ha, Oh Jeong-hee, Lee Cheong-jun, Yoon Heung-gil, Choi Chang-hak, and Kang Ho-moo, as well as stories of "people who are passionate about what they do" and ordinary people who enrich those around them, and portraits of people the author met through reading or at exhibitions, performances, and in everyday life, such as photographer Choi Min-sik, film director Andrei Tarkovsky, novelists Park Sang-ryong and Lee Mun-gu, painter Kang Yeon-gyun, artist Kim Ki-chang from Unbo, his nephews, and his farmer father.

The stories of the people Shin Kyung-sook met do not end here.
Through writings about “Miss Lee” and poet Heo Su-gyeong, which he met at a publishing company, an account of observing the cremation of Monk Seongcheol, a letter to novelist Park Kyung-ni, and an account of visiting novelist Oh Jeong-hee, the author also shows a gesture of serious reflection, reflecting on his own life through the lives of others.

A landscape of fresh words, a gentle emotion

The author of 『Beautiful Shade』, which showed the true beauty of our prose with meticulous sentences that could not neglect even a single comma or period and a feast of fresh emotions, is releasing a revised edition after ten years. He says, “I thought that my heart would remain the same even as time passed, but as the years piled up and more than ten years passed, I realized that I had come too far from some hearts and could not return, and sometimes I desperately wanted to go to some hearts but lost my way.”
But now that I have presented those feelings to the readers again, perhaps my wish back then to “write something that will not be forgotten for a long time” has already been fulfilled.