Alvin Lu lives in San Francisco. He is the author of the novels Daydreamers, 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. Recently he was guest Prose Editor at the literary magazine Your Impossible Voice. Other writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Dodge, Denver Quarterly, Firmament, new_sinews, Rain Taxi, ZYZZYVA, and the Akashic Books anthology San Francisco Noir.

+

 



Daydreamers

a new novel from Fiction Collective 2 — publishing July 15, 2025

Reviewers’ copies are now available from NetGalley or the publisher. Contact Samantha Huff-Robertson at sjhuffrobertson@ua.edu or the author at neoalvinlu@gmail.com.

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, for On the Seawall

+

Other Writings

The White Album, new_sinews, issue_8, August 2024

Review of Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and Lauren Fairbanks’s Prison Mars, 3:AM Magazine, July 2024

Lost Lives, The Dodge, Summer 2024

Two Tales, Your Impossible Voice, Issue 30, Spring 2024

+