Exploring Obscure Things and Failed Revolutions

Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for memoir.

“I've worked as a journalist … for quite a while. … But this [book] was the thing that was always in the back of my mind. Like, this was the thing that a lot of that was in service of. Just becoming better at describing a song or describing the look of someone's face—these were all things that I implicitly understood as skills I needed to acquire. ... It is sort of an origin story for why I got so obsessive about writing.”

Show notes:

• @huahsu
• byhuahsu.com
• Hsu on Longform
• Hsu on Longform Podcast
• Hsu's New Yorker archive
• 03:00 A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press • 2016)
• 30:00 "Randall Park Breaks Out of Character" (New Yorker • Feb 2023)
• 33:00 Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine • Drawn & Quarterly • 2007)
• 39:00 "What Conversation Can Do For Us" (New Yorker • Mar 2023)
• 39:00 "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep" (New Yorker • Mar 2023)
• 39:00 "The Many Afterlives of Vincent Chin" (New Yorker • Jun 2022)
• 39:00 "How Wayne Wang Faces Failure" (New Yorker • Jun 2022)
• 39:00 "Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work" (New Yorker • Jun 2020)

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