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In The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Kristof writes about the best fiction and nonfiction to read for glimpses into the secretive world of North Korea. Kristof writes:
“Thousands of North Koreans have fled their homeland since the famine of the late 1990s, and many are writing memoirs recounting their daily lives and extraordinary escapes. A leading example is ‘In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom,’ by Yeonmi Park, with Maryanne Vollers. Park is a young woman whose father was a cigarette smuggler and black market trader. As a girl, she believed in the regime (as did her mother), for life was steeped in propaganda and anti-Americanism. Even in her math class, “a typical problem would go like this: ‘If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?’”
What opened Park’s eyes was in part a pirated copy of the film ‘Titanic.’ ”
On this week’s podcast, Kristof discusses books about North Korea; Tui Sutherland talks about the graphic novel edition of “Wings of Fire”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles, Jennifer Szalai and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books mentioned in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:
“The Radetzky March” by Joseph Roth
“Winter” by Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Selected Letters” by John Keats
“The Secret River” by Kate Grenville
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
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