PEN World Voices 2020: A Festival Reading List

How To Be a Pirate, Isaac Fitzgerald (March 3, Bloomsbury)
Amazon | Indiebound
When the neighborhood boys tell her that she can’t be a pirate, CeCe consults her grandpa, who—given all his tattoos—surely must know something about pirates. As he shares the story behind each of his tattoos, Grandpa and CeCe embark on one adventure to the next, reminding us that we can achieve anything—as long as we believe in ourselves.

dayliGht: poems, Roya Marsh (March 31, FSG)
Amazon | Indiebound
Marsh’s debut collection of poems recounts her coming of age as a butch Black woman in America, during a time when gender fluidity and sexuality were rarely discussed. Her verses approach trauma with vulnerability and wit, blurring the lines between the personal and the political with stunning lyricism.

Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (March 31, New Directions)
Amazon | Indiebound
Melchor’s English-language debut is set in a Mexican village, where the murder of the local Witch leads to the rapid spread of rumors and suspicion throughout the village. Filled with brutality and violence, the world that Melchor creates reminds us that there is humanity in everyone, even when our surroundings become terrifying and unrecognizable.

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami (April 7, Europa Editions)
Amazon | Indiebound
Breasts and Eggs won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize in 2007 and marks Kawakami’s English language novel debut. Kawakami explores the experience of both girlhood and womanhood in contemporary Japan through the lenses of reproduction, body dysmorphia, and gender norms.

And Their Children After Them: A Novel, Nicolas Mathieu (April 7, Other Press)
Amazon | Indiebound
Mathieu’s novel spans four summers and four defining cultural moments, from the release of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to the 1988 World Cup. Set in a region of eastern France left untouched by the tides of globalization, And Their Children After Them, charts the adolescent discoveries of fourteen year-old Anthony, who is about to embark on a personal and political journey that will upend his world forever.

A Luminous Republic, Andrés Barba (April 14, Mariner Books)
Amazon | Indiebound
When 32 mysterious children arrive in San Cristóbal, they scavenge, steal, and perplex the city’s inhabitants, as they communicate in an unknown language. But as their transgressions grow increasingly violent and the city’s own children join their forces, the municipality must effectively embark on a hunt to find the kids, in the name of preserving order in a city teetering on the edge of chaos.

The King of Warsaw, Szczepan Twardoch (April 21, Amazon Crossing)
Amazon | Indiebound
Twardoch transports us to a Poland on the brink of fascism, where his protagonist Jakub Szapiro, a boxer and the right-hand-man to a powerful crime lord, feels on top of the world. Viewed as a hero in the Jewish community, Jakub imagines that he is invincible, even as he must maintain the order that has served him while a new one threatens his life.

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney Boylan (April 21, Celadon Books)
Amazon | Indiebound
In Good Boy, Jennifer Finney Boylan tells the story of her growth and transition from young boy to middle-aged woman, charting her journey across seven milestone moments and seven very good dogs. A story about self-discovery, learning to love, and embracing change, Boylan’s heartwarming book will remind you of all that we can learn from our furry, four-legged friends.

Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories, Oksana Zabuzhko (April 28, Amazon Crossing)
Amazon | Indiebound
Objective truth and personal mythologies collide in Zabuzhko’s short story collection, which centers on the question of just what truth is in this contemporary moment. She takes readers on a journey from the triumph of the Orange Revolution to domestic victories in matchmaking and sibling rivalry, challenging us to think about how things could be by incorporating elements of myth and fairytale in these breathtaking stories.

Little Family, Ishmael Beah (April 28, Riverhead Books)
Amazon | Indiebound
Beah’s Little Family is a story about the connections we forge in times of crisis. In this novel, five young people form a makeshift household in an abandoned airplane, and though they think they can keep the outside world at bay, the allure of wealth and status beyond the confines of their world proves to be more of a temptation than they think.

Cockfight, María Fernanda Ampuero (May 5, The Feminist Press at CUNY)
Amazon | Indiebound
Ampuero’s debut work is told from the perspective of a family maid, who witnesses horrifying domestic abuse. The novel unveils the hidden aspects of familial trauma, the insidious nature of violence masked as love, and the ways in which home can be both a nurturing or destructive force.

Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets, Patricio Pron (May 5, Knopf)
Amazon | Indiebound
Pron’s newest novel makes connections across time periods, tying the disappearance of a writer in 1945 to the story of a teenager in contemporary Milan. As the central mystery of the novel unfolds, Pron probes the question of what literature is, how it explains our times, and how the most unlikely connections can be wrought from the stories we tell ourselves.

Four by Four, Sara Mesa (May 5, Open Letter)
Amazon | Indiebound
Four by Four is set at Wybrany College, a school where the wealthy keep their children sheltered from the dangers of the wild world outside. When one of the “special” scholarship students suddenly goes missing from Wybrany’s campus, it’s clear that not all is as it seems at the institution, where freedom and power begin to be scrutinized under a new light.

A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Yuri Herrera (June 16, And Other Stories)
Amazon | Indiebound
Acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera reconstructs the tragedy of the 1920 fire at the El Bordo mine in Pachuca, a disaster shrouded in mystery that was long kept veiled by the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company―the largest employer in the region. In this act of restitution for the victims and their families, Herrera, who is from Pachuca himself, brings the weight of the injustice behind the fire to light.