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Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza by Hassan Kanafani
$ 17.95
"This astonishing account demands readers look directly at the horrors in Gaza without blinking." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Pizza Before We Die is a raw work of witness from the ground level of a genocide. Hassan Kanafani writes in the most unvarnished and yet precise way about the reality of what it means to have one's home reduced to rubble. The smallest, most intricate detail of daily survival bleeds into the most overarching view of atrocity. In its deep dignity and commitment to life, this collection of snapshots is both intimate and powerful." --Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
"In Pizza Before We Die, Hassan Kanafani writes the stories of his people under occupation and genocide from a seaside tent community in Gaza while the world seems to have turned away. With lyrical clarity, the author shifts between intimate moments and the vast scale of destruction enacted by Israel, describing both crimes against humanity in Gaza and the extraordinary spirit and dignity of the Palestinian people amidst unspeakable violence and immense suffering. Deeply humane and urgently necessary, Hassan has kept his promise to survive and tell these stories, and now, dear reader, these stories and lives are also our responsibility to carry." --Carrianne Leung, author of That Time I Loved You
"Within these pages you will find moments of horror from Gaza frozen into words. They will kindle a necessary rage at the inhumanity inherent in Israel and Zionism. A vital and necessary read in the best tradition of Refaat Alareer." --Aamir Hussain, author of Under the Full and Crescent Moon
"In Pizza Before We Die, Hassan Kanafani records the atrocities of genocide alongside the relentless search for basic day-to-day necessities that every Palestinian in Gaza faces--conditions by design stripped bare. This is both an account of the facts and a psychological portrait of endurance that acknowledges the costs such endurance exacts. What emerges is not a headline or a viral moment, but a life lived under catastrophe." --Garth Martens, author of Who Else in the Dark Headed There
"Kanafani offers a heart-scalding, intimate and beautifully written account of the life of suffering and endurance he and his family experience there, while well-fed men in suits count the profits of war and promote the rationalizations of colonialism and genocide." --rabble.ca
Hassan Kanafani (he/him) is from Gaza. He is a graduate from the Faculty of Engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.
Yasuko Thanh (she/her) is a writer and a creative writing instructor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC. Her first novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains (Penguin Canada), a tale of rebellion in French Indochina, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2016. Her bestselling memoir, Mistakes to Run With (Penguin Canada), which reflected on her journey from sex worker to successful writer, was a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Her most recent novel, To the Bridge (Hamish Hamilton), explored gaps in mental health care preventing suicide. Her next novel, The Falling Maria, is forthcoming in 2027.
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