Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (short stories)

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute is a collection of short stories by Grace Paley published in 1974 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Isaacs, 1990 p. 186-187: Bibliography, Primary Works, short story collections.

The stories in this volume were written while Paley was increasingly engaged in anti-war and anti-nuclear activism during the 1960s and 70s.Isaacs, 1990 p. 183-184: Chronology. And pp. 155–156: See here for critical reassessments of Paley's writing in light of her politics. And p. 156: As Paley "became more and more prominent as an activist...this, too, guaranteed a reactive backlash."English, 2007: "The stories in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) were written from the early sixties to the early seventies. She examined a wider range of ordinary New Yorkers, and tried to accomplish more thematically and technically, but with less success..."

"Distance" was included among the 1969 O. Henry Prize Stories.Isaacs, 1990 p. 186: Bibliography

Stories The original dates of publication and periodicals are indicated.Isaacs, 1990 p. 186-187: Bibliography, Primary Works, short story collections.

"Wants" (Atlantic, May 1971) "Debts" (Atlantic, May 1971) "Distance" (Atlantic, December 1967) "Faith in the Afternoon" (Noble Savage 2, 1960) "Gloomy Tune" (Genesis West 1, 1962) "Living" (Genesis West 3, 1965) "Come On, Ye Sons of Art" (Sarah Lawrence Journal, Winter 1968) "Faith in a Tree" (New American Review 1, 1967) "Samuel" (Esquire, 1968, 88 [under "Two Stories from the Five Boroughs"]) "The Burdened Man" (Esquire, 1968, 89) "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" (Atlantic, May 1972) "Politics" (Win 4, 1968) "Northeast Playground" (Ararat Quarterly 8, 1967) "The Little Girl" (Paris Review 14, 1974) "A Conversation with My Father" (New American Review 13, 1972) "The Immigrant Story" (Fiction 1, 1972) "The Long Distance Runner" (Esquire, 1974)

Background The success of Paley's 1959 collection The Little Disturbances of Man brought her to the attention of mainstream literary journals including The Atlantic, Esquire and the New American Review.Schwartz, 2017

Postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme has been credited with prompting Paley to assemble her second volume of short fiction.Schwartz, 2017: "[F]ifteen years passed before Enormous Changes at the Last Minute came out, and it might well have been more, had Donald Barthelme, Paley's neighbor and friend, not badgered her into putting together the second collection.Saunders, 2017 p. xvi: Paley "in cahoots with her pal Donald Barthelme."

Reception Enormous Changes at the Last Minute appeared 15 years after Paley's acclaimed first collection The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) and, as such, was highly anticipated.Isaacs, 1990 p. 153: The second collection "breezed into a climate of ready-made acclamation." This second collection elicited high praise from reviewers at New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Newsweek, Partisan Review, and Massachusetts Review, among others.Isaacs, 1990 p. 153-154: See footnote no. 5, p. 180 in Notes to Part 3 for reviewers and dates.

Biographer Neil D. Isaacs reports that Paley's elevation to a literary and cultural icon during the 1960s—due in part to her left-wing political activism—provoked "reassessments and resentments" among some critics.Isaacs, 1990 p. 155-156: See here on "Paley chic" that "guaranteed a reactive backlash." Negative reviews appeared in Hudson Review, Commentary, and the Times Literary Supplement.Isaacs, 1990 p. 157-160: See Notes to Part 3 p. 180-181 for reviews and critics.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a New York Times review, laments that Paley's stories had lost the timeless "universality" evidenced in her 1959 collection. Rather than celebrating the "cozy insularity of lower-class life," Enormous Changes at the Last Minute "records the big disturbances of the sixties—the growing brutality of street life, the increasing rawness of language, the falling apart of traditional human relationships."Lehmann-Haupt, 1974 Lehmann-Haupt offered the collection as evidence that Paley "no longer had the strength or will to transmute life into art."Lehmann-Haupt, 1974

Lehmann-Haupt's review provoked a sharp rebuke from novelist Philip Roth.Isaacs, 1990 p. 164: "Philip Roth took Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to task."

Retrospective appraisal Critic Sandy English at the World Socialist Web Site reports that the collection "examined a wider range of ordinary New Yorkers, and tried to accomplish more thematically and technically, but with less success." English reserves especial praise for two pieces: "Distances" and "Faith in a Tree," the latter concerning Faith's political opposition to the Vietnam War.English, 2007Schwartz, 2017: "Faith perches like a Sibyl on the branch of a sycamore overlooking the playground and delivers a manic monologue on all the great Paley concerns—war, socialism, capitalism, class, parents, children, sex, love".

Footnotes

Sources English, Sandy. "Obituary: Grace Paley and political culture". World Socialist Web Site, October 10, 2007. Accessed March 31, 2026. Isaacs, Neil D. 1990. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twanye Publishers, Boston. G. K. Hall & Co., Gordon Weaver, General Editor. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Changes Not for the Better". The New York Times, February 28, 1974. Accessed April 16, 2026. Paley, Grace. 1974. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. . Paley, Grace. 2017. A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Saunders, George. 2017. Introduction to The Grace Paley Reader. pp. xv–xxiv. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Roth, Philip. "Imagining Jews". New York Review of Books, October 3, 1974. Accessed April 30, 2026. Schwartz, Alexandra. "The Art and Activism of Grace Paley". The New Yorker, May 1, 2017. Review of A Grace Paley Reader (2017), edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley. Accessed May 31, 2026.