Cakewalk

New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. Sixth printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. [8], 228, [4] pages. Some front cover weakness noted. Signed by the author on the title page. An unalloyed delight in the rich, bourbon-flavored Southern tradition...Splendidly Realized Portraits. Lee Smith has held the mirror up to a certain slice of life and if the image seems a a little manic or crazy, well, it's because the life's that way, not the glass...for those of us tired of the witless caricatures of Southern folks in The Dukes of Hazard or Dallas, here is the real thing, potato salad and all. Contents cover Between the Lines; Georgia Rose; All the Days of Our Lives; The Seven Deadly Sins; Gulfport; Artists; Heat Lightning; Dear Phil Donahue; Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach; Not Pictures; Saint Paul; Horses; The French Revolution: A Love Story; and Cakewalk. In these dazzling stories, acclaimed author Lee Smith wants you to meet: Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse, who writes a "fortnightly" newspaper column called "Between the Lines;" Georgia Rose, the girl whose life is more like a soap opera than the TV serial she's addicted to; Martha Rasnick, the young housewife in "Dear Phil Donahue" who writes all her troubles to the TV personality; Florrie, the cake lady in "Cakewalk" who causes her prissy sister no end of embarrassment by "wearing running shoes, at her age, and wooly white athletic socks that fall in crinkles down around her ankles." Lee Smith (born November 1, 1944) is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (Harper & Row, 1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction. Since 1968, she has published fifteen novels, as well as four collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards including the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature in 2013. Smith published her first collection of short stories Cakewalk in 1981. It was also about this time that her marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she taught for many years. In 1983 her fifth novel, Oral History, became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, exposing Smith for the first time to a wide national audience.