From Paul Bowles’ Morocco to the San Francisco of the Beats, Literary Trips collects short literary memoirs with a travel bug twist and travelogues with a literary bent. Like many collections of essays, it is both entertaining and uneven. But serious fans of either travel writing or literary biography take note: Literary Trips may be too frothy and superficial to be satisfying.

The most poignant and effective contribution is editor Victoria Brooks’ piece on Paul Bowles in Tangier. She travelled to Africa and met the elderly writer months before he died. (Bowles, in fact, penned the foreword for Literary Trips.) It is a skillful essay, both a short biography of Bowles as writer and man and an evocative rendering of Morocco and Bowles’ place in it. Novelist Richard Taylor has written an autobiographical piece about Bruce Chatwin’s Australia (Taylor and his wife and children are living a nomadic existence, renting a beach house in New South Wales, when he writes the piece) that is perhaps the most thoughtful of the book, trying to explain “the malaise suffered by romantic wanderers who feel most at home with themselves when they are away from home.”

Most of the essays are snappy and fact-filled, and useful travel and recommended reading guides follow the text of each, but some of the writing smacks of a groupie mentality. There is a lot of daydreaming of the “it is easy to picture the great writer buying watermelon from this stand” variety. Would Elizabeth Smart really have “applauded [Ottawa’s] wonderful variety of festivals, such as the Spring Tulip Festival in May and the Winterlude Festival in February”? At its best, though, Literary Trips is a good antidote to the grey realities of winter in our part of the world.