Quarry Light

Fiction. A rat scratches behind the walls a father has painted and left. A man sends his daughter a friend request. A man draws a woman pictures she doesn't want, of her hair wound around her neck. In the stories of Claudia Smith's debut collection QUARRY LIGHT, women search for life after darkness and breath after violence. They listen to the song with the line about the cat in the dark. Their mother swims in quarry water the coolest, deepest green they have ever seen.

"Claudia Smith's QUARRY LIGHT is a remarkable collection rife with strange doings, comings and goings, beings of the sort uncommonly troubled and beautiful, in equal measures. The writing is elegant, sharp, sublime. The stories are frightening and heartbreaking. One doesn't want to mention names, but she brings to mind other sorely missed southern women writers whose remarkable work we all still read with awe."—Frederick Barthelme