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See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey into Kim Jong Un's North Korea Audiobook
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A "close-up look at the cloistered country" (USA Today), See You Again in Pyongyang is American writer Travis Jeppesen's "probing" and "artful" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of his travels in North Korea--an eye-opening portrait that goes behind the headlines about Trump and Kim, revealing North Koreans' "entrepreneurial spirit, and hidden love of foreign media, as well as their dreams and fears" (Los Angeles Times).
In See You Again in Pyongyang, Travis Jeppesen, the first American to complete a university program in North Korea, culls from his experiences living, traveling, and studying in the country to create a multifaceted portrait of the country and its idiosyncratic capital city in the Kim Jong Un Era.
Anchored by the experience of his five trips to North Korea and his interactions with citizens from all walks of life, Jeppesen takes readers behind the propaganda, showing how the North Korean system actually works in daily life. He challenges the notion that Pyongyang is merely a "showcase capital" where everything is staged for the benefit of foreigners, as well as the idea that Pyongyangites are brainwashed robots. Jeppesen introduces readers to an array of fascinating North Koreans, from government ministers with a side hustle in black market Western products to young people enamored with American pop culture.
With unique personal insight and a rigorous historical grounding, Jeppesen goes beyond the media cliches, showing North Koreans in their full complexity. See You Again in Pyongyang is an essential addition to the literature about one of the world's most fascinating and mysterious places.
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"See You Again in Pyongyang 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. Jeppesen ultimately accepts this lack of resolution, processing his relationship with the country through a combination of memoir, historical background, 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
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“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
Awards
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A Paris Review Selection of Staff's Favorite Books of 2018
See You Again in Pyongyang Listener Reviews
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Michael Barrett, 7/4/2022
About Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, poet, artist, and art critic. Jeppesen’s first novel, Victims, was selected by Dennis Cooper to debut his Little House on the Bowery series for Akashic Books in 2003. His critical writings on art, film, and literature have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, New York Press, Bookforum, The Stranger, and Zoo Magazine. He is the recipient of a 2013 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital / the Warhol Foundation, and he has taught as a visiting tutor in the art department at Goldsmiths University and as a visiting lecturer in Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art.
About Will Collyer
Will Collyer, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a film, television, and stage actor. He has starred in television shows such as Melrose Place, Charmed, CSI: Miami, and Boston Public, as well as numerous films and plays. He holds a BA in theater arts from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television.