Outside the Asylum

Grist, the University of Huddersfield's collection of 'the best short fiction of 2012', aims to 'place emerging writers alongside established writers in order to raise their profile and help them establish the first step to becoming professional writers'. For an open-submission anthology, the stories cluster around unexpectedly consistent themes: love, art, madness, birds, homes and houses, death and murder, randomness and coincidence. It's nicely organised too - thematically, the stories daisychain into one another, each often seeming to pick up a thread from its predecessor.

Some pieces seem more fragments than stories, and inevitably for an enterprise of this nature, there are misses as well as hits in here - but the hits are sound. Standouts for me: Tania Spooner's 'A Crack' infuses what appears to be a story of standard girly relationship paranoia with something more dignified and thoughtful; Toby Litt's 'Leaving Home, Bye-Bye' entertainingly reconstructs a Beatles interview; Steven Maxwell's miniature, fully-functioning Earth, mind-bendingly exhibited in an enormous gallery in the Science Museum, lingers in your thoughts long after reading. A good sampler of 'ones to watch'.