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These Are Our Demands
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 Menéndez, 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
“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 Menéndez, 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
200 pages, Paperback
Published August 22, 2017
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About the author
Matthew Pitt
4 booksMatthew Pitt is the author of three works of fiction: the novel Tear Here, and the story collections These Are Our Demands (Midwest Book Award winner) and Attention Please Now (Autumn House Prize winner). He has published stories in Oxford American, BOMB, Story, EPOCH, Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, and scores of other publications. A native of St. Louis, Matt now operates out of Ft. Worth, where he is an Associate Professor of English at TCU.
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September 16, 2019by Adam Nemmers
Sharp, irreverent, and spot-on, Matthew Pitt's These Are Our Demands crackles with idiosyncratic energy, offering twelve swiftly moving stories from undiscovered lives.
Pitt's prose is fluid and varied by voice, with a knack for delivering the right word—often a delightful word you’d not expected. Just as innovative are the story-lines themselves. The title story, for instance, inverts the usual trope of kidnapping, with a plot twist both trenchant and hilarious, then a resolution that turns that reversal on its head. The volume’s final story, “After the Jump,” features a not-yet-apocalyptic version of Earth that has been semi-desiccated by the consequences of space travel. In other stories we meet a waitress/ ex-haunted house hostess who stages car accidents; a con-man who disseminates jingoistic jingles for a living; a maestro searching for the perfect song. In other words, these are not your normal protagonists.
Though each character has a funny way of looking at things, their actions are governed by a taut yet twisted logic that proves enrapturing. In this vein a notable thread of eccentricity runs through his Delta Triptych, three stories set in the south of Mississippi that offer a kaleidoscope of local color. The cast of characters is drawn from caricatures of the Deep South: a racist grandmother in a one-sided feud with blacks; a town of blind bluesmen scheduled to be taken off the map; a would-be tryst between the daughter of a casino mogul and an erstwhile teeny-bopper heartthrob. Yet their accounts do not seem invented but rather discovered; denizens of flyover country who lead lives you'd have to read to believe (and you do both). That these people credibly occupy the same world is testimony to Pitt’s imagination and ability, vivifying a locale that perhaps neither the reader nor author had actually visited. In all, Pitt’s collection is splendorous in breadth and depth, further establishing him as one of our region's finest fiction writers.
https://mailchi.mp/889a6fc71cee/summe...
Sharp, irreverent, and spot-on, Matthew Pitt's These Are Our Demands crackles with idiosyncratic energy, offering twelve swiftly moving stories from undiscovered lives.
Pitt's prose is fluid and varied by voice, with a knack for delivering the right word—often a delightful word you’d not expected. Just as innovative are the story-lines themselves. The title story, for instance, inverts the usual trope of kidnapping, with a plot twist both trenchant and hilarious, then a resolution that turns that reversal on its head. The volume’s final story, “After the Jump,” features a not-yet-apocalyptic version of Earth that has been semi-desiccated by the consequences of space travel. In other stories we meet a waitress/ ex-haunted house hostess who stages car accidents; a con-man who disseminates jingoistic jingles for a living; a maestro searching for the perfect song. In other words, these are not your normal protagonists.
Though each character has a funny way of looking at things, their actions are governed by a taut yet twisted logic that proves enrapturing. In this vein a notable thread of eccentricity runs through his Delta Triptych, three stories set in the south of Mississippi that offer a kaleidoscope of local color. The cast of characters is drawn from caricatures of the Deep South: a racist grandmother in a one-sided feud with blacks; a town of blind bluesmen scheduled to be taken off the map; a would-be tryst between the daughter of a casino mogul and an erstwhile teeny-bopper heartthrob. Yet their accounts do not seem invented but rather discovered; denizens of flyover country who lead lives you'd have to read to believe (and you do both). That these people credibly occupy the same world is testimony to Pitt’s imagination and ability, vivifying a locale that perhaps neither the reader nor author had actually visited. In all, Pitt’s collection is splendorous in breadth and depth, further establishing him as one of our region's finest fiction writers.
https://mailchi.mp/889a6fc71cee/summe...
Displaying 1 of 1 review