Granta 109: Work

This number of Granta will repay a little effort with a rich reward of memorable pieces about jobs that stretch the meaning of "work" beyond all usual boundaries.

Reporting from Rwanda, Martin Kimani finds that the genocidal killers of 1994 enlist a "language of labour" to excuse their butchery.

In a peach of a piece, very moving and beautifully crafted, Aminatta Forna pays homage to war-ravaged Sierra Leone's only private vet as he cares for street dogs against all odds.

Less traumatically, Steven Hall meets new-wave robots and tries to read their "minds", Daniel Alarcón enjoyably hangs out with the publishing pirates of book-mad Lima, Colum McCann recalls the gritty but literate 1970s Dublin of his pressman dad - and Salman Rushdie, in a skittish riposte to honest toil, salutes the great sloths of literature from Hamlet to Bartleby and Oblomov.