The Accusation

Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea

Bandi, Deborah Smith

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780802189349
• Subtopic: World Literature

A PEN Translates Award-winning collection of short stories about life in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il, written in secret by a dissident author.

The Accusation is a revelatory work of fiction that exposes the truth of the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Jong-Il's leadership, the seven stories that make up  The Accusation throw light on different aspects of life in this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships.

One story, "Life of a Swift Seed," tells of a war hero and former ardent Communist who plants an elm tree in his back garden to commemorate one of his brothers-in-arms. When the tree is to be cut down to make way for a power line, the man is ready to defend it with his life, leaving a family friend to decide whether to intercede. In another story, "City of Specters," a Pyongyang mother's young son misbehaves during a party rally, crying out when he sees a portrait of Karl Marx, whom he thinks is a monster of Korean myth known as the Eobi. In one other story, a mother attempts to feed her husband during the worst years of North Korea's famine, and in another, a woman in a perilous situation meets the Dear Leader himself.

As a whole,  The Accusation is a vivid and frightening portrait of what it means to live in a completely closed-off society, and a heartbreaking yet hopeful portrayal of the humanity that persists even in such dire circumstances.

"Searing fiction by an anonymous dissident . . . A fierce indictment of life in the totalitarian North."— New York Times

Table of contents

• THE ACCUSATION
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• In Place of a Preface
• Record of a Defection
• City of Specters
• Life of a Swift Steed
• So Near, Yet So Far
• Pandemonium
• On Stage
• The Red Mushroom
• Afterword
• A Note from Do Hee-yun
• In Place of Acknowledgments
• Publisher's Note
• Back Cover