Put Your Head in My Lap

“Claudia Smith’s ‘Put Your Head In My Lap’ is a vivid book of short fiction that both inspires me and makes me feel inadequate. She takes the everyday–cooking dinner, a stained sink, physical attraction–and renders them in such precise detail, that even “a collection of soiled fingernails in a shot glass” becomes almost unbearably beautiful.”

“For years I’ve been finding these little Claudia Smith stories. They draw me in so easily, with something familiar if slightly odd, and before I know it I’m consumed by a world far deeper than so few lines have any right to contain. In ‘Put Your Head In My Lap,’ each of the stories is anxious, intimate, and powerful. Yet together they form a narrative of love and separation–like a flash novel. She’s a terrific writer.”