Chapter one. London: Inventing a City : Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations ; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes ; P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh ; Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps -- Chapter two. Paris: Writers' Paradise : Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time ; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood ; Marguerite Duras, The Lover ; Julio Cortazar, The end of the game ; Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood -- Chapter three. Kraków: After Auschwitz : Primo Levi, The Periodic Table ; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories ; Paul Celan, Poems ; Czeslaw Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004 ; Olga Tokarczuk, Flights -- Chapter four. Venice-Florence: Invisible cities : Marco Polo, The Travels ; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy ; Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron ; Donna Leon, By Its Cover ; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities -- Chapter five. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat: Stories within stories : Love Songs of Ancient Egypt ; The Thousand and One Nights ; Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days ; Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red ; Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies -- Chapter six. The Congo-Nigeria: (Post)Colonial encounters : Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart ; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman ; Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko, or The Rape of African Discourse ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck -- Chapter seven. Israel/Palestine: Strangers in a strange land : The Hebrew Bible ; The New Testament ; D. A. Mishani, The Missing File ; Émile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist ; Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden -- Chapter eight. Tehran-Shiraz: A desertful of roses : Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis ; Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds ; Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz ; Ghalib, A Desertful of Roses ; Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight -- Chapter nine. Calcutta/Kolkata: Rewriting empire : Rudyard Kipling, Kim ; Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World ; Salman Rushdie, East, West ; Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes ; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies -- Chapter ten. Shanghai-Beijing: Journeys to the west : Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West ; Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories ; Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City ; Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ; Bei Dao, The Rose of Time -- Chapter eleven. Tokyo-Kyoto: The west of the east : Higuchi Ichiyō, In the Shade of Spring Leaves ; Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji ; Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North ; Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility ; James Merrill, "Prose of Departure" -- Chapter twelve. Brazil-Columbia: Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias : Thomas More, Utopia ; Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism ; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ; Clarice Lispector, Family Ties ; Gabriel García Máruqéz, One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Chapter thirteen. Mexico-Guatemala: The Pope's blowgun : Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs ; Popl Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life ; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Selected Works ; Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President ; Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations -- Chapter fourteen. The Antilles and beyond: Fragments of epic memory : Derek Walcott, Omeros ; James Joyce, Ulysses ; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ; Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad ; Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands -- Chapter fifteen. Bar Harbor: the world on a desert island : Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine ; Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs ; Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian ; Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle ; E. B. White, Stuart Little -- Chapter sixteen. New York: Migrant metropolis : Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time ; Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth ; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son ; Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King ; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.