Alvin Lu lives in San Francisco. He is the author of the novels Daydreamers and The Hell Screens.
He is an MFA recipient from Brown University, winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose, and judge for the 2026 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Recently he was guest Prose Editor of the literary magazine Your Impossible Voice. Other writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Denver Quarterly, The Dodge, Evergreen Review, Firmament, minor literature[s], new_sinews, Rain Taxi, ZYZZYVA, and the Akashic Books anthology San Francisco Noir.
Daydreamers
a new novel from FC2 | July 2025 | paperback | 9781573662123
To solve a love-triangle murder, a Taiwanese novelist takes a California road trip with her friend’s son into the heart of the émigré Chinese literary world, where rumors swirl, money talks, and memoirs, novels, and translations compose the source material for a twenty-first-century Rashomon.
Cycling through nested literary forms and genres, and fiction and reality, Daydreamers unravels a mystery set against the greater mystery of American identity, by means of the stories immigrants make of their pasts, presents, and desired futures in a protean new world.
"Daydreamers promises another journey with Alvin Lu, who has an extraordinary capacity to build worlds that unseat order and genre simultaneously. I look forward to being unseated, blurred, and bewildered by this one."
—Alina Stefanescu, author of My Heresies