Barnes & NobleStay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come. Rachel Kushner, two-time National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars RoomIn the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Kenwith his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie 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 doesnt 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.