Jim Vines

Armed with the fantasy of becoming the next hotshot Hollywood screenwriter, young Trent Nordhoff packs his bags and flees his home town of Wilkesburgh, Pennsylvania. Driving hell-bent for three days and nights, he ultimately touches down in the proverbial land of milk and honey—Los Angeles, baby!—where he settles into a dreary Hollywood apartment and an even drearier day job selling solar energy products by phone. What follows is a nine year odyssey as the budding scribe becomes caught up in the maelstrom that is Tinseltown: the ubiquitous shysters, gold-diggers, dealmakers, misfits, backstabbers, and an unending cavalcade of lustful women. Trent’s journey is a perilous fence-walk between sanity and insanity en route to distinction and prosperity—and Luigi’s Chinese Delicatessen vividly captures every sublime step and gut-wrenching stumble along the way.