Hit Your Brights

A collection of stories by Constance Squires
Hit Your Brights captures people in tough spots, often of their own making. Fusing humor and tragedy, these thirteen gritty stories keep readers in suspense. Danger lurks, the needle skips, the bomb goes off, and the empties pile up. Outcomes are unpredictable, but the car always starts, and, sometimes, love wins.
The collection of the storis showcases a virtuosic range of styles and perspectives. The title story, told in second person, excavates the rationalizations of an alcoholic stumbling through the inexorable progress of her disease. After downing nine Rolling Rocks and three tequila shots, she races her car to the nearest liquor store before it closes, turning on her high beams to ease her double vision.
Constance Squires casts the diminished circumstances of her characters with authentic detail familiar to any reader who has spent time in flyover country. Beautifully crafted, with a distinctly modern edge, the stories in Hit Your Brights give voice to women and men, young and old, overlooked and disenfranchised, who inhabit worlds that feel at once strange and familiar.
> Shatabdi Sarker Poushi