Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero, Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch --- chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature --- set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring 80 exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan and Olga Tokarczuk, Damrosch explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.