PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu

This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come. Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room

One of the New York Times s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken 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.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends his memories Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

An elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives. 

2023 Pulitzer Prize Committee

Quietly wrenching. . . To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. . . This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life. . . Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout. 

The New York Times

[Hsu] is that rare thing: a chronicler and critic who [engages] fully, emotionally as well as intellectually, with every subject. . . In Stay True Hsu makes us see how his and Ken s and their friends stories are tossed on the sea of history, how identity takes shape from a thousand factors, how personalities flow into one another, how chance and destiny can be hard to tell apart. 

Lucy Sante, The New York Review of Books

An evolutionary step for Asian American literature. 

New York Magazine

[A] luminous and tender-hearted story. . . Stay True is a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory. 

The Wall Street Journal

[Hsu writes] with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it. [Stay True] is a thoughtful, affecting book. . . For all the soul-searching, therapeutic work and years of rumination imprinted on Stay True, it s the ache of a friendship lost but honored that will linger for readers. Though Hsu claims, self-deprecatingly, that the term good friend only occasionally applies to me, the lasting effect of Stay True is that of an extraordinary, devotional act of friendship. 

The Washington Post

A beautiful memoir [that] goes deep into the heart of friendships. T

he Financial Times

Not since Ann Patchett wrote about her friend Lucy Grealy in Truth and Beauty has there been such an achingly tender book about a platonic friendship. 

The Los Angeles Times

Ladenpreis Deutschland € 32,00

ISBN 9780385547772

Penguin

Sprache Englisch