New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu was catapulted to literary stardom with his breathtaking memoir Stay True, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other media outlets. It also recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography: with his book, the judges note, Hua has “crafted a transformative addition to the Asian American canon and to the critical conception of what a memoir is capable of.”

Stay True tells the story of Hua and Ken, who struck up an unlikely friendship despite their very different interests, and the marks that their time together left on Hua’s life. In a world of immense diversity, Hua shows us how staying open to difference and disagreement can help us develop our own complex identities, both as individuals and as communities.

“We fixate on differences,” Hua tells Lavin, “when what really matters—not just in friendship, but in friendship as a model for community—is the dreams and visions we share, and how we help each other see things that we can’t see alone.”