Alvin Lu is a novelist who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Daydreamers, which is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2, and The Hell Screens.
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.
An MFA recipient from Brown University and winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose, he is represented by Akin Akinwumi at Willenfield Literary Agency.
The Hell Screens
“Will appeal to anyone who loves the cat-and-mouse games of Nabokov, the playful elegance of Borges or the rarefied dreamscapes of Calvino.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Written with precise elegance, and populated by ghosts, mediums, and criminals, Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens is surrealist noir set in a shadow version of Taipei that exposes the spirits and superstitions of Taiwan’s complex past lurking beneath its modern cityscapes. Alvin Lu has a singular imagination accompanied by the gift of enviably gorgeous prose. “Haunting” is the right word for this work—encountering The Hell Screens again, I realize I have been carrying the voice and images of this astounding novel in my mind as ghostly dream fragments for the last two decades.”
—Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island