Daniel Perry’s debut short story collection, Hamburger (Thistledown Press), is a representative range of him maturing into his style over a decade of writing. Equally, they together tell contemporary hardship – people attempting to get through the “meat grinders” of life and come out whole, or, at least, not entirely broken, on the other end.
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What:Hamburger (Thistledown Press, 2016)Who:Daniel Perry is the author of the short fiction collections Hamburger (Thistledown, 2016) and Nobody Looks That Young Here (forthcoming, Guernica, 2018). His fiction has been shortlisted for the Carter V. Cooper Prize, and has appeared in more than 30 publications including The Dalhousie Review, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, SubTerrain, Black Heart Magazine (U.S.), Little Fiction, The Prague Revue (Czech Rep.), and the Stone Skin Press anthology The Lion and the Aardvark (U.K.). He has also published a regular column in The Prague Revue and book reviews in The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, Broken PencilandThe Bull Calf Review. Originally from Southwestern Ontario, Perry now lives in Toronto, where he is co-host and blog co-ordinator for the Brockton Writers Series. He can be found at www.danielperryfiction.wordpress.com and on Twitter @danielperrysays.Why you need to read this now:The short fictions in Daniel Perry’s debut collection, Hamburger, range from dark satirical perspectives to situational ironies and often set in motion a paradox or unresolved event with which the reader is left to grapple. Compiled and published in various Canadian, American, and UK-based magazines and anthologies over the span of a decade, these vignettes and longer fictions transport the reader geographically and emotionally, creating variety and diversity. Perry’s work explores contemporary life in locales such as Toronto’s urban centres, the roads of California, the canals of Venice, and the villages of Nicaragua. Unfettered and often harsh, the stories collectively form an arresting and striking first book.Hamburger champions the people who are simply trying to get on in a world that no longer sees them as individuals of validity, complexity, worthy of respect — those who become reduced to meat to feed the grinders belonging to the more powerful. The collection is about loss, loneliness, and the alienation of life on the wrong side of the wealth gap, the generation gap, contrasting those victims and perpetuators of culture shock; a new world-weariness for an over-credentialed, underemployed generation’s precarious moment, and the struggle to strive despite it.Perry’s sense of place defines the stories in Hamburger. Readers will find pieces of themselves in the woman attending, without a date, the wedding of her shallow, obliviously inconsiderate best friend; the disenchanted and newly-single man who books a solo cruise vacation to the Caribbean, only to find pleasant surprises among the inauthenticity; the coffee house employee battling a sense of failure and how to escape a loveless marriage, finding solace in a TV-doctor’s promise of a self-actualizing six-step program. These stories move the people who populate them into decisions that offer tense moments of hope and beauty.What other people are saying:“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“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 Catch Me When I Falland The Dove in Bathurst Station“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, author of The Monkeyface Chronicles* * *Big thanks to Stephanie at Thistledown for sharing Hamburger with us! We can’t wait to read this meaty collection.
