Winged Shoes and a Shield ─ Collected Stories

"A walking badass of a book."?Rolling Stone

"Don is a great writer. His work is worth reading." -- Henry Rollins

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.

Author, screenwriter, actor, and performer Don Bajema lives in New York City.

Novelist, screenwriter, actor and performer Don Bajema was born in St. John’s, New Foundland, Canada in 1949. He is the author of two highly acclaimed collections of short stories, ?Boy In The Air” and ?Reach." As an actor, Bajema first appeared on stage in the west coast premiere of Sam Shepard’s ?Curse of the Starving Class”. With a lead role in the 1983 film ?Signal Seven”, Bajema began a long-time collaboration with groundbreaking independent film director Rob Nilsson. He had a lead role in Nilsson’s 1988 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winner ?Heat and Sunlight” and he wrote and starred in the 1996 film ?Chalk” which Nilsson directed. He has appeared in more than a dozen feature films, most recently Carl Franklin’s 2002 film ?High Crimes”. A favorite on the ?spoken word circuit”, Bajema has toured extensively in the US, Canada and Europe, performing at hundreds of clubs, theaters and universities. He has shared the spoken word stage with the likes of Hubert Selby, Henry Rollins, and Jim Carroll. He is a former world-class track and field athlete who competed in the 1972 US Olympic trials and played football for legendary coach Don Coryell at San Diego State University. He currently lives in New York City with his family.