About this Event
Alvin Lu visits the store to discuss his second novel, Daydreamers. Told through letters, interviews, travelogues, and unclaimed fragments, Daydreamers moves through foggy cities, cluttered studios, desert highways, and vanished publishing circles—where stories are currency and silence is survival. Lu constructs a novel that is both noir and anti-noir, both memoir and anti-memoir—a mystery that resists solving, and a translation that becomes its own original work. Lu is joined in conversation by Stacey Levine, author of Mice 1961.
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.
Upon the discovery of an unfinished manuscript left behind by his late father, a son’s act of literary translation quickly descends into a ghost story of family rumors, art, and the history we inherit, whether we want them or not. As the son translates the mysterious text, what emerges is a narrative haunted by betrayal, artistic rivalry, and a M**der in California’s Chinese literary underground—one that was never solved but perhaps was fictionalized.
Cycling between San Francisco, Los Angeles, China, and Taiwan, the novel unfolds across generations of Chinese immigrants and diaspora artists, linked by tenuous friendships, publishing feuds, and the obscure threads of an act of violence. At the center: a spectral woman named Lena Wu, the object of literary fixation, political allegory, and real-life scandal.
Was the manuscript meant as a novel or a confession? Was the story’s central figure—Lena Wu—a real person or an idea and persona passed between generations of writers, each shaping her into their own myth? And what is the narrator’s responsibility when his father’s version of events begins to implicate those still living?
Alvin Lu ls the author of the novels Daydreamers and The Hell Screens. His writing has been published 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. He lives in San Francisco.
Stacey Levine is the author of Mice 1961, a 2024 novel that The Washington Post called “a rich and surprising country of curious hilarity, skewed lighting, awkward pratfalls, and ludicrous conversations.” Also the author of The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, and My Horse and Other Stories, Levine received a PEN USA fiction award, The Stranger Genius Literature Award, and an Artist Trust fellowship. Her reviews and fiction have appeared in Tin House, Fence, Yeti, The Iowa Review, Bookforum, and The Seattle Times; an omnibus of her recent and past short works, What Is the Real World and How Do We Find It? will be published in 2026 by Verse Chorus Press.
Pre-order your copy of Daydreamers here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
