Now here's a neat idea. An anthology of 12 short stories by 12 different writers, each of them illustrated by a different artist.

So far, so not-out-of-this-world, but here's the good bit: in part one, the writing is inspired by the art, in part two, the opposite. The result, according to editors Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, 'covers space travel, Japanese deities, wolves, monster husbandry and the Marx Brothers'.

Potentially, it’s the first part of the book that's most interesting, simply because it's much more common for finished stories to then be illustrated (think Dulac, Rackham, Greenaway, NC Wyeth, Charles Keeping and a whole host of artists kept in brushes by the Folio Society). Less usual (unless you're still in short trousers at school and the teacher asks you to come up with a 100-word story based on Waterhouse's The Lady Of Shallot - or am I showing my age here?) is for writers to conjure up a living, breathing tale from a single, probably quite abstract, image.

And so it seems to be. Nine pages in (and the first of the first story by Ben Greenman), fear is an octopus, and anger a squid; Ryan Boudinot kicks off his tale with 'I used to be a plastic bottle, you sons of b-----s' in response to Pietari Posti's image of a skyscraper-sized deer peering down at a car-sized Chris Ware-type baby.

But hold on. Part two’s pretty wonderfully strange as well. Nous Vous has illustrated Tao Lin’s story about a vegan muffin working for NASA with a double-page spread of what look like those heads you make out of inky fingerprints. For the more literal-minded reader, an illustration of a bell made of violet feathers has at least spawned a story about violet, called 'My Violetation'. Um, not so literal after all, then.

This is a wonderful little book, beautifully designed and produced. It’s sub-title is Illustration vs. Short Fiction, but what We Are the Friction actually shows to great effect is how the constraints of working with someone else’s ‘art’ can in reality unleash twice the creative energy.

To find out more about We Are the Friction, go to www.singstatistics.co.uk

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