NYU Reads brings the NYU community together around a single common reading, chosen by a University committee made up of faculty, student, and administrator representatives. Building on our undergraduate schools’ first-year reading programs, NYU Reads extends this dialogue beyond NYU Welcome and opens it up to the entire University community.

The 2024-2025 NYU Reads selection is Hua Hsu's 2022 memoir Stay True: A Memoir. 

Stay True charts Hsu’s experience as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s—his days filled with mix tapes, “zines,” and making friends laugh and think. Social media and cell phones barely existed; email was so rarely used that friends checked one another’s inboxes every 2-3 weeks, as a neighborly gesture. As distant as this may seem from our current world, much of what Hsu evokes remains relevant, even pressing, to students today: from the significance that matters of taste (in music, movies, clothes) can suddenly take on, to a growing sense of one’s identity, to the important and transformative role that close friends can play in our lives.

After one of his closest friends at Berkeley dies in a senseless act of violence during his junior year, Hsu comes to grips with remembering the past in a way that does justice to both the meaningful and the mundane, as well as with the grief of losing someone so young, when growing up still means growing outward. The timeless themes of Stay True will prompt NYU readers to reflect on what it means to engage with each other today—to listen and cultivate curiosity; to build bridges with those who are different from us; and to grow from our experiences and contribute what we learn to the community. Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor of literature at Bard College. 

Stay True: A Memoir was named one of the Top 10 Books of 2022 by The New York Times, receiving the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award and 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.

NYU Health Sciences Library provides print copies to employees of NYU Langone Health through our Document Delivery Service. (If you have not created a Document Delivery account, you must create one through the link first.) Then sign in through the link to request any of the titles below.  You may pick up at the library or request delivery to your home address. Happy reading!

NYU Langone Health users may read the eBook format of Stay True through this link.  Please use the EPUB Full Text on the left-hand side of the screen to access the text. 

Access through your local pubic library for book copies, digital or print.  New York Public Library offers a free online library access to people aged 13 or older who live, work, attend school, or pay property taxes in New York State. Sign up for an NYPL digital library card today.  Read online through the Kindle or Libby app.