New stories by a writer from Louisiana. Linked stories about a group of people in New Orleans, part coming of age, part living the adult life. Each story crystalizes around a moment of choosing or living with the choice that's made. Painful and beautiful. ( )

"There is real trouble in the world, but there is magic too."

Reading Barb Johnson's debut collection is like catching up on old friends after high school, then after college, then when you're in your late 30s. Within the 9 stories that is what we get as we follow four friends in the back streets of New Orleans as they try to deal with life and its discontents.

When readers of short fiction think of the working class and their struggles, they are apt to think of Raymond Carver, whose tales of poverty pinched at the back of your brain with an utter sadness and grittiness. While Johnson's stories does follow the disenfranchised and forgotten, the difference is that her stories teeter on hope. All of her characters are in the space between giving up, yet not quite. The title of the collection captures it all: More of This World Or Maybe Another; or more of what we have now or maybe it might change. Her characters are hopeful in that way, seeing towards the future while living lives of drug addicts, lovers with hearts broken, and guilty consciousness of not being able to provide. Johnson's stories are about survivors not after the fact, but during the tumultuous events of their lives: we are seeing survivors surviving with sparkles of hope in their eyes. Johnson's worldview presented here is refreshing.

Her language is also remarkably her own as she skillfully maneuvers with different people and different personalities: like Delia, who struggles with grasping a foothold in this world that she is never quite used to, but was always there in front of her; there's Pudge, haunted by days of ridiculed in childhood, events which follows him attacking his manhood; there's Dooley who can't really seem to understand the world around him. All these characters and more tell stories that are heartbreaking, yet at the same time very hopeful.

Again, refreshing.

Indeed, More of This World or Maybe Another, is a very refreshing collection of interconnecting stories that reads more like a novel-in-stories than simply a story collection. To read this is to see the characters grow fully in a world gorgeously painted in all of his beauty and ugliness. Barb Johnson is surely a writer to keep an eye on. With already several wins in the literary world, Johnson is indeed someone we expect to hear from for quite a while. ( )

I'm not usually fond of short stories, but this collection held my attention. Partially because they deal with the same or interconnected characters throughout, and partly because of the vividness and depth of each and every character. The central theme is being trapped--by circumstance, economics, history, addiction, education, emotion, etc. The stories cover a 20 or so year span of time, and the evolution, or lack thereof, of the characters is brilliantly told. ( )