Hamburger

AVAILABLE FROM

THISTLEDOWN PRESS
INDIGO (CANADA)
BARNES & NOBLE (U.S.)
AMAZON (WORLDWIDE)

OR AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE NEAR YOU!

“Hamburger consistently skirts cliché from both sides, exploiting both the face value of the worn-out trope and the value of critical reflection… Perry layers the ordinary with subtle complexities that push us into new territory… ‘Three Deaths of James Arthur Doole’ is simultaneously earnest and ironic, simple and intricate. Daniel Perry’s stories are confident and nuanced.”

–Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, The Winnipeg Review

“Daniel Perry’s first collection has a curious title given hamburger’s associations with grinding out inferior quality. But not so. The stories are arranged in three grinds, “coarse” (13 very short stories), “medium” (nine stories of more conventional length) and “fine” (which features a single novella, told from three perspectives). The Toronto writer’s stories are entertaining, sometimes provocative and always original.”

–Toronto Star

A nomadic young bartender tries to quit smoking. A crotchety writing teacher stands on the brink of losing everything he loves. A family wrestles with the legacy of its war hero patriarch. An eight-year-old boy challenges his mother to start picking up the pieces of their broken home. In more than 20 vignettes, flashes and stories, many of them previously published in SubTerrain, Riddle Fence, Little Fiction and abroad, Hamburger takes readers to Venice, Cleveland, Nicaragua, Lithuania and several Canadian locales on its quest to explore the emotional struggles and hard-won illuminations of life on the through-side of the grinder.

What people are saying about Hamburger:

“The incisive, finely-crafted stories in Daniel Perry’s Hamburger reveal themselves like icebergs; sometimes beautiful, sometimes imposing, sometimes portending danger and tragedy, but always with much more weight and mass hiding just beneath the surface. While devouring Hamburger, the thinking, feeling reader will find much to savour and digest.”

–Richard Scarsbrook, White Pine Award-winning author of
The Monkeyface Chronicles and The Indifference League

“The characters in Daniel Perry’s Hamburger are a motley crew—addicts, adulterers, liars and the faithful, all of them searching for something they can’t find. Perry captures entire worlds in these deft yet swooping stories—in sketches snappy and precise, he shows us the magic in the downtrodden, and gifts us images that linger long after the last page is turned.”

–Amanda Leduc, author of The Miracles of Ordinary Men

“In compelling and diverse stories, Hamburger reveals the fraught interior lives of ordinary people and the profound depths in ordinary moments. Whether Daniel Perry is sketching out the chance encounter between strangers on a streetcar or the intimate connections between family members, the stories in Hamburger expose the complexities and tensions in human relationships. Hamburger is absorbing and insightful.”

–Patricia Westerhof, author of The Dove in Bathurst Station
and Catch Me When I Fall

“After everyone else has gone home, Perry’s words still linger, capturing all the bruised and battered lives lit up under the harsh house lights.”

–Andrew F. Sullivan, author of Waste
and All We Want is Everything