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.
