`Something always happens on a walk, either in the head or on the road ahead. I hope you enjoy following them all. Duncan Minshull

The little man then made an attack. He climbed with his hands and feet, wildly. Brambles forced him back and stones slid beneath his feet. The peak swayed and tottered and was about to smite with a granite arm. The summit was a blaze of red wrath.

But the little man at last reached the top. He swaggered with valor to the edge of the cliff.

His hands were scornfully in his pockets.

He gazed at the western horizon edged sharply against a yellow sky. `Ho!' he said. `There's Boyd's house and the Lumberland Pike.'

The mountain under his feet was motionless. Stephen Crane, `The Mesmeric Mountain

`I am looking for something more mysterious. For the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth, whose entrance the weary prince could not discover.'---Alain-Fournier

Walkers, like lovers of literature, are driven by the urge to explore, and writers have blessed their fictional characters with itchy feet since the earliest of narratives. Milton's Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Mrs Yeobright's maternal anxiety spurring her across country in Hardy's The Return of the Native, militant miners in Zola's Germinal: walks found in novels, short stories and even drama can have a multitude of meanings. Editor Duncan Minshull here forges a botd path through the greatest of the world's literature, collecting extracts from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Proust and Poe, Kipling, Kafka and many more to show imaginations time and again set in motion by the simple act of walking.

Duncan Minshull is a producer at BBC Radio and the editor of various anthologies, including The Vintage Book of Walking. He has also written aboout the subject of walking for newspapers and magazines. He lives in west Lodon.

Will Self is the author of seven novels, four collections of shorter fiction and four novellas. He is a contributor to a plethora of publications and a regular radio and television broadcaster. He is also a notable walker and writer on walking, most recently in Psycho Too, his second collection of ambulatory pieces for The Independent newspaper. He lives in London.