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.
Born in 1984, Joshua Baldwin grew up in New York City, graduated from the University of Chicago, and now lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of an illustrated chapbook, Poems and Fake Book Reviews, which included a poem that became a semifinalist for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize. Baldwin’s poetry and criticism have also appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.
