See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey into Kim Jong Un's North Korea Audiobook

Quotes

• “Probing…[and] artful.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A close-up look at the cloistered country over weeks, not a few days like most outsiders…[In] a country known for its contradictions…Travis Jeppesen, a Berlin-based writer, chronicles life inside this closed world.”

  — USA Today

• “What makes See You Again in Pyongyang worth reading is the tension between the bold explorer and the impenetrable country, the feeling of frustration in the face of lies and exclusion and petrified resistance. Jeppesen may get as deep as Pyongyang will allow, at least to an American. That might not make him an expert, but it gives him more cred than most of us: he went, and chances are, we never will.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Dramatizes a meeting point between an intellect with a passion for getting lost in other cities and landscapes and an environment that by its very design forbids such a sensibility from ever gaining foothold. What ensues is not a polemic, but rather a romance of antitheses…and the bringing to light of others’ stories that our own ideologically biased media seldom care to find for themselves.”

  — Los Angeles Review of Books

• “[A] first-person account of life in a ‘multifaceted, misunderstood, and unsummarizable’ nation. The author read and traveled widely enough (to festivals, revolutionary sites, etc.) to understand that ‘paranoia and suspicion’ are omnipresent in the police state, finding himself ‘alternately charmed, intrigued, disgusted, amused, terrified—often all of these at once’…A candid and disturbing portrait of life under a dictatorship.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• [Jeppesen] knows how to talk about art, and he comes alive in his granular analyses of what he dubs 'Norkore' propaganda music and regime-approved 'Norkorealist' painting.... He captures [North Koreans'] entrepreneurial spirit, and hidden love of foreign media, as well as their dreams and their fears.... What makes See You Again in Pyongyang worth reading is the tension between the bold explorer and the impenetrable country, the feeling of frustration in the face of lies and exclusion and petrified resistance.

  — Los Angeles Times

• A probing look ... inside Kim Jong Un's North Korea... Striking ... Jeppesen gives us a direct glimpse of North Korea's psychological techniques at work.... Artful... An up-close and vivid account.

  — New York Times Book Review

• Offers...thought-provoking first-hand insights into daily life in North Korea, deconstructing fallacies around a number of our stereotypes about that enigmatic hermit nation at the same time as it exposes their social constructions about us.... See You Again in Pyongyang is important reading for its timeliness at a critical juncture in U.S. negotiations with North Korea about denuclearization.

  — New York Journal of Books

• A moving memoir of the first American to study at a university in North Korea and an eye-opening clarification of the U.S.'s role in Korean history.

  — Ben Shields, Paris Review