The Wilshire Sun

The Wilshire Sun is a mirthful novella about a whimsical, hapless over-aspiring, under-achieving young writer from Brooklyn who moves to Los Angeles to write for the movies. With understated deadpan humor and dynamic slyly original language and off-kilter imagery Joshua Baldwin has created a novella that will 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 — magically hang together and offer a delightfully absurd portrait of the artist as a young man in the City of Angels.

“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