ALVIN LU at Books Inc. Alameda

Meet author Alvin Lu in conversation with Shawna Yang Ryan

Alvin Lu reading and signing copies of his new novel, The Daydreamers. He will be in conversation with Shawna Yang Ryan author Water Ghosts

Published by FC2/University of Alabama Press

A fragmented manuscript left unfinished, a voice inherited by time, a ghost lingering in the margins—Daydreamers is what remains when fiction forgets its fiction and when the story you’re translating becomes your own.

“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, finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Alvin Lu is the winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose and is the author of the novel The Hell Screens. He has served as guest Prose Editor of the literary magazine Your Impossible Voice. His writing has appeared in 3:00AM Magazine, Denver Quarterly, The Dodge, Evergreen Review, Firmament, minor literature[s], new_sinews, Rain Taxi, ZYZZYVA, and the Akashic Books anthology San Francisco Noir. He makes his home in San Francisco.

Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts and Green Island. She taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Books Inc., 1344 Park Street, Alameda, United States