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Put Your Head In My Lap
By Claudia Smith

$5.00, 44 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-32-6
From Claudia Smith, the award-winning author of The Sky Is a Well, comes a new collection full of emotionally taut and sweetly melancholic stories that evoke the pain of lost love and broken families.Claudia Smith lives and teaches in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

"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." ... Mary Miller, author of Big World

"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." ... Robert Shapard, co-editor of the Sudden Fiction anthologies

These characters are looking for something, striving to find solace or love or a child or even money-whatever the problem is today. There is love in this book and yearning and pain and healing. And Smith manages it in two pages, a page, a paragraph at a time. ... - Ghoti magazine

A locket, hair, a collarbone: again, the familiarity of such physical objects is recast in such a way that readers can't help but ponder their symbolic meanings; again, Smith's words-their simplicity, their frankness, the magic of their admissions, their very utterances-become more than words; they become experiences, revealed to us. And are we worthy? When else have we been entrusted with so much? I can't say I've ever felt such a connection to a writer's (dare I say?) soul ... -The Chapbook Review

Put Your Head In My Lap accomplishes what so many young flash/vignette writers are attempting at every online and print journal with a pension for the shortest of stories: a crisp, clean, complex narrative woven with invisible plot and seamed by tangible characters who do not require thousands of words in order to exist. Claudia Smith makes them real, shapes their faces, and does so in a quiet avalanche of small words, one at a time, until we are unknowingly bricked into her humanity. ... Rumble magazine

The 16 short short stories in this 41-page chapbook are compelling and immersive when you're in the act of reading them, but they get even better when you've finished and moved onto recalling them.
...the stories operate like memories, sharp and edgy on some points... but also blurred and dreamy at other points and seeming altered by the process of recollection ... Black Ocean microreview

I've read a lot of Claudia's short fiction in the last few years but I wasn't prepared for the emotional wallop this collection packs. They're the kind of stories where reviewers toss around words like "heartbreak" and "tender" except the stories are razor sharp and the characters resilient. Don't be fooled by the brevity of the stories or the book's slender size. These stories will bring you down a notch and then they'll cut you down. ... Jim Ruland, author of Big Lonesome

I read the first half of this book in a state of unease, anxiety, and the second half in pleasure. The stories are both anxious and pleasurable. It seems true we can't separate our mood from the book we read, that unease breeds unease and pleasure, pleasure. But these stories are less separable than most. They work in. ... Joseph Young, author of Easter Rabbit

Claudia packs more emotion, loss and empathy into a handful of words than most writers do in stories than run on for pages .....Ben Tanzer, author of the novels Lucky Man (Manx Media, 2007) and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine (Orange Alert Press, 2008) and the short story collection Repetition Patterns (CCLaP, 2008)

The mundane as minefield. " ...a new collection full of emotionally taut and sweetly melancholic stories that evoke the pain of lost love and broken families." In the most respectable vein of Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Kim Chinquee, Deb Olin Unferth ... Smith also has the ability to push electrical currents through the tiny hooks on which narrative is hung. - Pilot Books