This book embarks on a mental journey around the world through literary texts in 20 chapters. Traffic, education, markets, politics - everything has entered a global movement. "World literature," as understood here, has nothing to do with "canon" noise, but rather represents a grassroots democratic process of foreign and self-experience - often at the very edge of what is permissible and conceivable. "World literature" is understood as "world language literature," as a "world wide web" of stories, motifs, and characters. A network in which all authors inscribe themselves, facilitating connections and encounters across space and time. Almost everything we know about the important matters of the world, we know from the stories we tell about them. And many fictional characters have long since become inhabitants of reality. A world without Antigone and Emma Bovary is a world without value.