These Are Our Demands: Stories

The characters in Matthew Pitt’s These Are Our Demands grasp at last chances. Through subversive–and sometimes fabulist–satire, this collection explores the wilderness beyond the borders of polite society.

The stories in These Are Our Demands vibrate with the ‘magical every day, ’ each one finely tuned to the strange, hilarious, and often unsettling pulse that beats beneath the ordinary. Matthew Pitt has written a brilliant study of us, one that will keep you smiling and thinking for days. With the humor of Thurber and the algebra of Borges, he reveals the buried restlessness that ripples the surface of modern life.

–Ana Menendez, author of Adios, Happy Homeland!

Matthew Pitt’s These Are Our Demands is an inventive, powerful collection. It showcases Pitt’s keen eye for the ways that his characters struggle to be more than the person that they are, despite the fact that they are, as one story puts it, ‘falling behind the curve.’ These are stories deeply rooted in place that peel away the illusion of safety to find a deeper truth, something startling and beautiful.

–Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

In turns both dark and shimmering, Matthew Pitt’s beautiful prose simmers with uncertainty and unease, humor and heartache, tenderness and toughness. This collection of timely, timeless stories is filled with characters who teeter on the precipice between getting what they want and losing what they have, a panoply of desire and desperation, of unrealized dreams and unexpected kindnesses. It’s a truly wonderful book.

–Aryn Kyle, author of The God of Animals