Winner of the 2020 Prix Medicis etrangerI want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished. Join Antonio Munoz Molina for a walk through Madrid, Paris, London and New York, where the past and the present live side by side in the literature of newspaper headlines, billboards, casual glances and overheard conversation.

This is the digital metropolis, captured in notebooks, recorded on the iPhone, where Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Fernando Pessoa and Walter Benjamin step beside us, all of us writing the unfinished poem of the crowded city.