Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Hua Hsu

Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and

greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.

The present was a drag. We lived for the future. Youth is a pursuit of this kind of small immortality.

memorabilia—color reproductions of old posters,

In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you’re experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else’s.

Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.

Derrida’s “deferral of meaning” and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.

shards of the past kept disappearing, crowded out by algorithmically preferred results.