Daydreamers
By Alvin Lu. Forthcoming 2025 from Fiction Collective 2.
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
art by Steve Barbaro
The Hell Screens
By Alvin Lu. Revised edition published by Camphor Press, 2019, 194 pages.
Chêng-Ming, a Taiwanese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one; he’s searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Chêng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Chêng-Ming’s sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan – an island of restless spirits – assail Chêng-Ming even as they captivate the reader.
On 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
“The Hell Screens is a seductive, beautifully constructed, cinematic work. Alvin Lu has written a cooly elegant, slyly witty, ambitious, and ultimately mesmerizing novel.” —Carole Maso, author of AVA
“The Hell Screens is a unique book that crosses and erases the boundaries between continents and cultures, past and present, reality and dreams, human and spirits. Lu takes readers all the way to the darkest core of the human psyche through his elaborate, dreamy, and labyrinthine narrative. We’ll no longer feel the same about our world after we return from the maze of The Hell Screens.” —Wang Ping, author of American Visa
“A hypnotic venture into the uncertain reality of liminal existences. Sophisticated readers will relish Lu’s ambitious debut.” —Publishers Weekly
“Magical realism doesn’t capture the character of this poetic and intelligent novel: its blurring of current events and myth is more subtle, more realistically grounded.” —Steve Tomasula, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Anyone with experience in a Chinese community will be struck by how apt yet original Lu's observations are, of the ways in which Chinese culture interweaves spiritual and material beings.” —Shirley Geok-lin Lim, South China Morning Post
“A beautifully written, wonderfully paranoid vision of late 1990s Taipei … a powerful work with some of the best writing I’ve seen in a Taiwan novel.” —John Grant Ross, Taiwan in 100 Books
“Agreeably deranged ... likably stylish and amusing” —Kirkus Reviews