The characters in These Are Our Demands grasp at chances forever bobbing away. Their lack of power may be due to language or cultural barriers, racial or age discrimination, or because they hail from parts of the country where merely getting by passes for rousing success. These twelve narratives range in aesthetic from tidy realism to a more slanted, fabulist bent, and are concerned with the contours of where our culture is headed, explored through subversive satire.