The modern technological revolution annually provides us with new formats and types of texts - from emails and e-books to blogs and Twitter, changing not only the ways of distributing and reading literature, but also the ways of creating it. At the same time, some terms that have come into use quite recently take us back to the depths of the history of literature. In a vibrant, entertaining form, Harvard professor Martin Puchner explores the history of seminal works created over four millennia in different parts of the planet, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to the Harry Potter novels, presents a new perspective on the wonderful phenomenon called literature, and makes an attempt to predict its future fate and ways of influencing you and me. “The deeper I plunged into the history of literature, the more excited I was. It seemed strange, sitting at my desk, to talk about how literature itself shaped the history of mankind and the history of the planet. I needed to visit the places where great texts and inventions were born. It was impossible to take a single step on these travels without discovering some form of recorded fiction. I tried to distill my impressions into a narrative about literature and how it has transformed our planet into a literary world.” (Martin Pachner)