Alvin Lu lives in San Francisco. He is the author of the novels Daydreamers (from FC2) 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 at 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.
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 kind of sinks in slowly. Then it becomes absorbing in a way that doesn't let up. It slowed me down from the rattle of the outside world. I was grateful for this. Most striking are its observations and textures of San Francisco: beautiful.”
—Stacey Levine, author of Mice 1961