City Lights and FC2 celebrate the publication of
Daydreamers
By Alvin Lu
Published by FC2/University of Alabama Press
Alvin Lu and Stacey Levine discuss his new book.
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: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. He makes his home in San Francisco.
Stacey Levine is an award winning novelist, short story author, and journalist. She has published three novels and two story collections. Her novel Mice 1961 was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and her stories and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, including Fence, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, The Seattle Times, The Stranger, and YETI. She lives in Seattle, where she teaches at Seattle Central College.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.