[Lee Smith's Cakewalk] works to confirm our conviction of the solidity, complexity, and downright delightfulness of her fiction. These fourteen stories, written over a period of eleven years … offer us worlds not necessarily unfamiliar yet charactered by Smith originals, men and women and children whose lives reveal the rarities too often left unnoticed in hour to hour existence….

The force of Smith's stories (like the force of her novels) depends largely on [the] ranges and depths of vision, vision not just of character or narrator but of the author herself. Grounded always in the recognizable world of Krogers and "Cool Club Rules," [Smith's] characters, through what they see and what they say, stretch and extend the boundaries of accepted reality, and take us to existential borders we've never before imagined. Smith's characters, like friends we have lost touch with and yet cannot forget, restore to us insights too...