This image is the cover for the book Keeping Her Difficult Balance

Keeping Her Difficult Balance

In this short story from the “stunning” collection More of this World, Maybe Another, a woman is about to marry a man she grew up with (Dorothy Allison, award-winning author of Bastard Out of California).

The lives of four unlikely friends intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans. Living amid poverty and violence, these fragile heroes of the American underclass redefine our notions of family, redemption, and love.  Keeping Her Difficult Balance is the story of one of these characters. 

Praise for the short stories in More of this World, Maybe Another

“Johnson has a deep well of empathy for her characters, and her book's big heart beats strongest when portraying Mid-City's most marginal characters.” —Publishers Weekly

“A pitch-perfect, utterly original, dazzlingly flexible narrative voice.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Severance

Barb Johnson

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.

HarperCollins