Winged Shoes and a Shield
Collected Stories
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Hallucinating between childhood and manhood, Eddie Burnett is both hero and anti-hero in this hard-hitting collection of linked stories. Coming of age in California's post-war suburbs and freefalling through the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies, Eddie's transformation from a boy's innocence to a man's hardened wariness is captured in lyrical, emotionally raw episodes. He navigates the minefields of American masculinity in a series of disturbing, yet strangely uplifting odysseys, from hope to despair and back again.
"A walking badass of a book."—Rolling Stone
"Don is a great writer. His work is worth reading."—Henry Rollins
Author, screenwriter, actor and performer, Don Bajema lives in New York City.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian actor and novelist Bajema s astute and unconventional collection of interconnected stories follows Eddie Burnett, a goony 13-year-old boy eager for a girl s attention; driving the narrative, his coming-of-age trials take place amid the parched canyons of Southern California. Told in vignettes (published in the books Reach and Boy in the Air in 1996 by Henry Rollins s imprint, 2.13.61), these lyrical stories treat a range of topics, from schoolboy football stardom and infatuation with a local beauty to Eddie s encounters with his emotionally battered father, described as a dog of war with a soul in pieces. Decades flow by, as the author reveals Barnett s life as a trailer-park boy during the 60s and 70s and later as an unhappily married man. Memorable boyhood shenanigans (some with tragic endings) precede accounts of other characters consumed by their own predicaments. Bajema s prose combines the precision of pop-song lyrics with the surreal haziness of a fever-dream. A raw and direct pathway into the mind of an independent youth trapped in the culture of Southern California.
