We're Gonna Get Through This Together (paperback)

By Z. Hanna

Pre-order ships March 4, 2025

A sharp and affecting debut story collection that takes a discerning look at what happens when people search for connection in an alienating world.

Blending satire, realism, and speculative fiction, Z. Hanna writes incisively about race, class, gender, sexuality, art, and activism—exploring the forces that bring people together and drive them apart.

In the titular story, a white antiracist consultant tries to figure out how to sustain her work after her Mexican-American girlfriend abandons their coaching practice. “A Little to the Left” tells the story of a lesbian home from college who recruits a boy she knew in high school to help her become more queer. A supervisor at an “elective prison” in “The Birmingham Effect” struggles to motivate his team as the company navigates a public scandal. In “Heroes’ Journey,” a trans couple attends a psychedelic retreat for climate activists while trying to heal their relationship.

Scintillating, funny, and heart-rending, We’re Gonna Get Through This Together invites readers to investigate what separates us, while encouraging all of us to find a path forward together.

Book Details:
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback Original
Pages: 176
ISBN: 978-1-964403-00-7

Early Praise:
“Incisive, wry and big-hearted, We're Gonna Get Through This Together playfully explores absurdities and contradictions in modern living around whiteness, queerness, activism and artmaking.”

—Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello

“We’re Gonna Get Through This Together packs a punch! These stories are high-octane contemporary satire, touching on movement politics, relationships, gender, race—the full catastrophe of 21st century American life. I sense a little Dorothy Allison, a drop or two of Toni Cade Bambara, a shade of Lorrie Moore. A satisfying and provocative debut from Z. Hanna.”

—Jess Row, author of The New Earth and White Flights 

“In this exciting debut collection, Z. Hanna emerges as a brilliant satirist, vivisecting contemporary platitudes on race, class, gender, and sexuality, and deftly tracking the commodification of human connection by American capitalism 5.0. I laughed at these characters and cried with them too. We're Gonna Get Through This Together is a hilarious and moving takedown of do-goodism, consumer culture, and the business of helping people—for a fee.”

—Janet Sarbanes, author of The Protestor Has Been Released

“A surgical, savvy, and very funny evisceration of neo-capitalism and all its attendant acronym-laden techniques for commodifying your emotions. Capturing the sweet (sour?) spot where Buddhism and sales techniques collide, these stories are what George Saunders might write if he was non-binary, a few decades younger and spent more time Googling.”

—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“In Z. Hanna's off-kilter collection, We're Gonna Get Through This Together, a therapist suggests that a couple text each other their Google searches to rekindle their connection, a woman joins a feminist organization called FUCKU to ‘feel less alone,’ and another narrator tells their partner, ‘The thing you don't realize about me is that I'm an artist.’ By the end of these wildly inventive, satirical, and sometimes heartbreaking stories, it's impossible to deny that Z. Hanna is an artist.”

—Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain

“We’re Gonna Get Through This Together uses fiction to upend rote solutions, asks questions nobody seems to be asking, undoes ego by undermining safe positions, and writes as if words might still mean something. Here—in all their hyena-like glimmering and canny and sad and agitating and tender and gut-bustingly funny touches—they do. Z. Hanna is a writer not just to watch but to, with every zingy and urgent molecule, follow.”

—Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals