ven Birds Are Chained To The Sky and Other Tales is a collection of the winning stories from The Fine Line Short Story Prize. They are the stories of many lives, captured in a few pages in all their complexity, beauty, serenity, struggle, longing and peculiarity. Some are tales of joy and others woe; some tell of destructive lust and others slow-blooming love. They are lavish, restrained, fantastical and beguilingly everyday, drawing the reader into the lives their characters inhabit. Some are dark tales of violence, bleakness and betrayal, their imagery troubling and their characters brutal; while others are joyous, funny, whimsical and tender.

Ira Nayman’s short story “A Really Useful Engine” appears in Even Birds Are Chained To The Sky.