The Wilshire Sun
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With his surreal and paranoid debut novella, Baldwin makes a solid contribution to the subset of literature that explores the Hollywood dream. Written in the first person and partially in an epistolary style, with a clearly unreliable narrator, the novella bears hallmarks of Nathanael West and seems to knowingly invite comparison. Surreal and paranoid, Jacob's story encapsulates the legend of Los Angeles as told by an outsider. Jacob, a young writer from Brooklyn, lives with his mother and aunt and aspires to move to Los Angeles with a work acquaintance to write screenplays. After a false start lands him back in New York, he finally makes it to L.A. for good. However, life in the city doesn't provide the fecund creative experience he'd anticipated, and his tenuous mental state declines rapidly. The ensuing narrative becomes ever more dreamlike, and the fictional letters he writes to and from imaginary people (that he "has a feeling" he'll meet in L.A. "so I may as well get to know them a little bit now") grow more nonsensical, treating readers to a tantalizing glimpse beyond the edge of sanity.
