More of This World or Maybe Another

By Barb Johnson
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061732270, 208pp.)

Publication Date: September 30, 2009

Categories: General

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the October 2009 Indie Next List

Barb Johnson has been a carpenter in New Orleans for more than twenty years. In 2008 she received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. While there, she won a grant from the Astraea Foundation, Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers, and Washington Square's short story competition. She is the fifth recipient of AROHO's $50,000 Gift of Freedom. This is her first collection.

"In this wickedly fine debut, Barb Johnson proves herself a master of the short story. Both the familiar and the extraordinary come to life on every page, and her characters will haunt you for a very long time."
-Joseph Boyden, author of Through Black Spruce, winner of Canada's 2008 Giller Prize

"What a pitch-perfect, utterly original, dazzlingly flexible narrative voice Barb Johnson has. Her collection of gritty, sad, funny stories from the Gulf Coast, More of This World or Maybe Another, is a truly exciting debut."
-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Severance

"By the time we'd read the opening of "Killer Heart," we knew Barb Johnson would deliver something special. Her fiction is expertly crafted, nimble, full-hearted and affecting. It was a thrill to read her story and to be the first to present the fiction of this rich new voice."
-Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda B. Swanson-Davies, editors of Glimmer Train Stories

"Precise and gorgeous language...A wonderful sense of humor..Pathos made over into something much more effective--a vision of all these people just doing the best they can. These are stunning stories...the kind that reveal, enlarge, and make living seem worth the trouble."
-Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina