Less than a month after she first heard about Hassan Kanafani’s firsthand online accounts of living in Gaza, writer Yasuko Thanh had received an offer to publish his work in book form. 

Thanh is no stranger to the publishing process: she has written two novels, one short-story collection, and a memoir, with a third novel forthcoming next year. But almost a year after she first heard of Kanafani at a Health Care Workers Against Genocide rally outside the B.C. legislature, Thanh still finds the speed with which Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza went from a collection of reddit posts to a manuscript accepted for publication remarkable.  

“That’s the speed of solidarity,” Thanh says, quoting the foreword she wrote for the book, which publishes in Canada on May 5. “Let’s just underline that fact.”

At the rally on July 1, 2025, Thanh happened to meet Bobby Arbess, an activist who overheard her mention she was a writer. As Thanh tells it, he started talking to her to see whether she might be able to help him and a couple of other activists who were trying to find a way to monetize Kanafani’s reddit posts so that he might be able to make some money from his firsthand observations of life in Gaza during the ongoing war. 

Thanh didn’t immediately think she could be very helpful, as that particular skillset is “not really [her] wheelhouse,” but as the pair spoke she remembered that she had recently read the online diary of Ali Maali Al-Turk, a paramedic in Gaza who had links from his social media accounts to a book that collected his writing alongside a donation link for readers who wanted to support him. Thanh shared what she knew of this model and exchanged contact information with Arbess.

As they continued to exchange messages, Thanh learned that a group of activists were organizing Kanafani’s reddit posts into a longer project and asked whether she might be able to help with that work. 

And that is where Thanh’s own experience proved well suited to the task. She looked at the document and found that the posts had been grouped together thematically, but it was clear to her that arranging the material chronologically would make the writing more impactful. 

“It was the simplest way to tell the story, and I feel it also honoured the original reddit posts,” Thanh says. “In this particular case, simplicity built the most powerful narrative.”

Kanafani, whom she soon began to message directly about the project via WhatsApp, agreed, and trusted her to take a leading role in organizing his work. They spoke about more than just the project, talking about faith and reflecting on the series of coincidences that led to them working together on the project.

“It’s strange, if you don’t believe in fate or providence or god, or whatever you call that force that brings people together at the right time at the right place for work to be done,” Thanh says of the book’s serendipitous origins. “But because I do believe in those things, and so does Hassan, we firmly believe that everything happened the way it did in order for the work to be done and in order for his message to get out.”

Not long after she began to work on reorganizing Kanafani’s material, she had a manuscript that was ready to be sent to a publisher, and friend and fellow author Tom Cho connected her with Arsenal Pulp Press publisher Brian Lam. 

Thanh sent Lam a manuscript on July 28. Two days later, he had accepted it for publication. 

The speed with which Arsenal Pulp Press accepted Pizza Before We Die for publication is not typical, but Lam says the subject matter was personal, given the press’s membership in the Publishers for Palestine group. 

“We recognized that his story was so important that we needed to get it out into the world as soon as possible,” Lam says. “It’s not a book by a journalist or by an analyst or by an academic. There are extraordinary books out there from people like that, but what struck us was that Hassan’s an ordinary citizen; he’s a young student of architecture basically writing from his heart and really just wanting to let the world know what it was like for him and other Gazans in that situation.”

The book covers the time period between December 2024 and July 2025. Kanafani writes matter of factly of his life in Al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of agricultural land on the Mediterranean, where he lives in a tent with his family, sharing the daily realities of life under siege in Gaza: the hunger and scarcity of food and other necessities, the everyday roar of war planes. The book takes its title from an overheard snippet of conversation between two young girls. “Let’s just fulfill our dream and eat pizza before we die … no one knows,” one says to the other. 

The book has received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, and orders have been so strong that Lam says a second printing is already in the works. Demand has been strong both in Canadian pre-orders and in export markets, with 60 to 70 per cent of sales coming from the U.S. and U.K. where the book was released in early April.

“The part that’s most emotional for me is that you have people in these horrible circumstances like [Kanafani] who are continuously thanking us for the work that we’re doing when they’re the ones doing all the heavy lifting,” Thanh says. “It’s always the people that have the least, who are in the worst circumstances possible, that will be able to say thank you to people like us who are living with such privilege. It’s very, very humbling.”