Alvin Lu lives in San Francisco. He is the author of the novels Daydreamers, which is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2, and The Hell Screens.
He is an MFA recipient from Brown University and winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose. Other writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Dodge, Denver Quarterly, Firmament, new_sinews, Rain Taxi, Your Impossible Voice, ZYZZYVA, and the Akashic Books anthology San Francisco Noir.
Daydreamers
a new novel forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2, July 2025
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 presents as a series of stories told through filters of translation, raising questions of authorship and origins, offering different textures of kinds of narratives, from the personal memoir to the reportorial. A genizah of documents and tales, Lu's novel mixes the early years of the Cultural Revolution with present day California, where Yoshinoyas compete with expensive real estate.
Transcending traditional genres, this is a mesmerizing mapping of a mystery of the disappeared, of heirs and survivors with elusive motives, and a story of immigration, brilliantly inflected with undercurrents both noir and comic.
—Susan Daitch, author of Siege of Comedians