Lee Smith has been pegged by a number of reputable reviewers writing in equally reputable publications as a regional writer, an author who can easily be mentioned in the same sentence as Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor and Ellen Glasgow….

[The stories in Cakewalk] do not deny the validity of the comparison, but such pigeonholing does not tell the whole story. Smith does set her fiction south of the Mason Dixon line, where she also happens to live, and she does indeed have a talent for replicating the embellishments of the mountain yarn. The best of the stories in this collection, however, go beyond regionalism, telling about people and their relationships in a way that transcends geographical location and regional temperament. While Smith's accent is authentically Southern, her style has none of the self-indulgent decadence of a Faulkner—magnificent as that style is—and her...