About
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir
A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, TIME, Rolling Stone
'One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith's Just Kids' – The Atlantic
When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.
Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
'A glorious, unforgettable book' - Patrick Radden Keefe Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He teaches at Bard College and is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. Stay True was named one of the 'Ten Best Books of 2022' by The New York Times, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Originally from the Bay Area, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith's Just Kids' The Atlantic
The deeply moving, Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age memoir of music, youth and being an outsider
A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, TIME, Rolling Stone
'One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith's Just Kids' – The Atlantic
When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.
Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
'A glorious, unforgettable book' - Patrick Radden Keefe Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He teaches at Bard College and is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. Stay True was named one of the 'Ten Best Books of 2022' by The New York Times, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Originally from the Bay Area, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith's Just Kids' The Atlantic
The deeply moving, Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age memoir of music, youth and being an outsider