Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Industrial Revolution is, for better or for worse, our inclination to define who were are by what we do, and this essential new issue of Granta will lay bare the intrinsic link between work and identity.

From the jobless to the workaholics, from the hard work of dying to the landscape work has created out of office parks and suburbs, Granta 109 will tell the story of how and why we work in the twenty-first century. Joshua Ferris returns to the mind-numbing world of office work in America in a new piece of fiction, while Steven Hall visits the world’s pre-eminent robot lab to see what machines will do for us next. Caroline Moorehead explores the trafficking of workers into the United Kingdom and Daniel Alarcón infiltrates the world of book pirating in Peru. Salman Rushdie contributes a surprising essay on sloth.

Granta 109 gives us a glimpse of ourselves at our most primordial, in a day and age when work has become the most invisible (at least in literature) and yet all-encompassing aspect of human life.