The Aquariums of Pyongyang

North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history.

Kang Chol-Hwan lives and works in Seoul, where he is a staff writer for Chosun Ilbo, a daily newspaper in South Korea Pierre Rigoulot is one of the contributing editors to The Black Book of Communism Yair Reiner is a translator, writer, and radio producer who lives in Brooklyn, NY