The Wilshire Sun

"Like the naive main characters in so many American novels and films--say, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive--Baldwin's Jacob discovers Los Angeles is much different than he expected. . . . In his] delightful novella, disarming slackers live life on their terms, bringing to mind younger versions of The Big Lebowski."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"With his surreal and paranoid debut novella, Baldwin makes a solid contribution to the subset of literature that explores the Hollywood dream . . . treating readers to a tantalizing glimpse beyond the edge of sanity."--Publishers Weekly

"Baldwin's characters search for fame in the shape-shifting landscape of Hollywood. He has a voice that follows the mirage even after it disappears. The Wilshire Sun is a surreal, giddily original debut that plumbs the myth of Los Angeles."--James Frey

The Wilshire Sun is a mirthful novella about a whimsical, hapless, over-aspiring, under-achieving young writer from Brooklyn who moves to Los Angeles hoping to write for the movies. With understated deadpan humor and dynamic, sly, original language and off-kilter imagery, Joshua Baldwin has created a novella that may remind readers of an improbable roundtable meeting of Tao Lin, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, and Jack Benny. The elements of the novella's constitution--clipped pieces of fast-paced immediate narrative interspersed with epistolary matter and off-the-cuff riffs on junk food, screenwriting, Walt Whitman, big brothers, bum grandfathers, and crackpot friends--offer a delightfully absurd portrait of the artist as a young man for our times in the City of Angels.