Stay True

Hua Hsu’s remarkable memoir examines the reverberations of a friendship frozen in time by untimely death.

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Review of ‘Stay True’

Stay True is a memoir born of trauma. In the summer of 1998, Hua Hsu's friend and classmate Ken Ishida was murdered in a carjacking just before the start of their senior year at the University of California, Berkeley. However, this is not an account of that event. Instead, Stay True examines the reverberations of…

Interview with Hua Hsu

Ever since his friend was murdered in 1998, Hua Hsu has been searching for a way to capture the feeling of their time together.

Featuring ‘Stay True’

Best Nonfiction of 2022

This year’s best nonfiction books ran the gamut from timely to timeless. Meghan O’Rourke, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Linda Villarosa broke new ground in our understanding of illness. Memoirs by fiction writers including Amy Bloom, Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Erika Krouse told gripping true stories with a novelist’s flair. And beloved favorites such as Ed Yong, Ross Gay and Stacy Schiff rose to meet their fans’ high expectations.

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