My Grandmother’s Braid and 9 Other Reads I Can’t Get Out of My Head

If you’re the kind of person who eats a small portion of bittersweet dark chocolate for dessert every night (I’m not, but I’d like to be), you might enjoy this small portion of bittersweet dark fiction. Alternatively, if you’re the sort of person who likes quantifying things, you might consider starting your year off with an extremely short novel, such as this one, purely for the satisfaction of “getting one under your belt.�

The titular grandmother is a sadistic lunatic who, along with her husband, has been charged with the care of their orphaned grandson, Max. The three Russians emigrate to Germany and live in a home for refugees, where the grandmother institutes a reign of domestic terror. She forbids Max from eating sweets, playing with other kids, or mingling with Jewish people; she tells him that he is “allergic� to human hair and has “a cursed appearance� that makes people want to beat him up, which might be the meanest thing a fictional grandmother has ever said. When Max’s grandfather sires a baby out of wedlock, things get even darker for this twisted little family.

Anyone struggling with an existential hangover from 2020 will find a certain “hair of the dog� relief in this comic feel-bad novel. Bronsky has a Dickensian flair for writing about miserable children—or, rather, the miseries of childhood.

RIYL: �gota Kristóf, Elena Ferrante, disobedience, exaggerating, being stubborn, hoarding free condiments

Tété-Michel Kpomassie is from Togo, a skinny West African country sandwiched between Benin and Ghana. While browsing at a bookstore as a kid, Kpomassie discovers a book about Greenland and becomes obsessed with somehow getting to the land of polar nights and granite cliffs. After spending eight years travelling northward, he finally boards a ship bound for the world’s largest island, carrying only a rucksack filled with a folding camera, some paper, and two pairs of mittens. “Don’t get crushed by an iceberg,� a commissioner helpfully warns.

Upon arriving in Greenland, Kpomassie is met with an excited crowd. It’s the first time the locals have seen a Black man, and they freak out. “For the children I was a fearsome supernatural being who came to exterminate the village,� Kpomassie explains to himself. The parents are more thrilled than intimidated by the stranger, and almost everyone offers to house him. Kpomassie settles in and makes observations: bloody seal broth is a staple food; sometimes an angry old man will commit suicide by walking out onto the frozen sea until he falls through a break in the ice; it’s really hard to pee when you’re wearing fur pants without a fly.

This is a classic work of anthropology written by a person who is clearly and nonchalantly brilliant, picking up foreign languages the way other people pick up dirty socks, and deploying words like “bodkin� and “calcined� in throwaway sentences. The photo insert is brief but electrifying.

RIYL: Anthropology in general, l’heure bleue, fantasizing about moving to a faraway place without warning, overproof spirits

Don’t make a fuss. Don’t get blisters on your feet. Don’t sweat. Don’t be pretentious, but also don’t be dimwitted. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t order drinks with maraschino cherries. Don’t ask questions. These are a few of the lessons drilled into Rosie Monroe, an art student at Parsons in the 1980s, by her hectoring, slippery boyfriend — an older gentleman she met when he hit on her at MoMA. Bennett introduces young Rosie to a WASP-y world of boathouses, silver butter dishes, and men who wear cravats with a straight face. It is unclear where his money comes from, or why he constantly goes on the lam in the middle of the night, but Rosie is swept up and gets pregnant and they move to a remote corner of Vermont. Bennett pursues sinister schemes while Rosie attempts to keep their tumbledown house heated, the baby fed, and the lights on. Soon it all goes to hell…

This is a page-turner about a tough woman and her con-artist lout of a partner, and I will eat my laptop if it doesn’t get optioned for TV or film the minute it hits bookshelves. It is also woven through with ideas about feminism, parenting, narcissism, and self-sufficiency — a book that is easy to read without being remotely lightweight. It is published by Two Dollar Radio, a small press out of Columbus, Ohio, which I think of as the Barry Bonds of small presses: They hit an astonishing number of home runs.

RIYL: Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, being up at the crack of dawn, steeping in the delusional brew of your own mind