Literary Trips is a book for dreaming and travelling. As its subtitle suggests, the book guides readers to the haunts of 22 famous writers on four continents and several islands. Each entry includes an essay on the destination and plenty of useful information about how to get there, where to stay, what to see, and where best to catch glimpses of a literary lion’s legacy.

A reader could use the book to plan a decade’s worth of literary vacations. There are directions to the landscapes Robert Louis Stevenson saw in Hawaii, and suggestions about how to look for Tolstoy’s spirit at his country estate, Yasnaya Polanya. With a map by your chair, several winter evenings could be spent planning a trip down North America’s Pacific Coast to see Raymond Carver’s Washington state and the California of Jack London and John Steinbeck. Even if you never make one of the suggested trips, the journeys you can imagine with the aid of this book will broaden your horizons.

The quality of the writing, however, varies from section to section. Some entries are filled to overflowing with adjectives and not-very-insightful first-person descriptions. Others are written in solid journeyman prose. Among the best are Douglas Fetherling on Pablo Neruda and Chile, Burf Kay on Robertson Davies and Ontario, and Marda Burton on William Faulkner and Mississippi.

Thankfully each section also includes a list of the works of the writer in question. But even the best of these essays – some of which seem to have been lifted nearly intact from magazine or newspaper travel sections – fail to match the genius of the writers in question. As Burf Kay says about Robertson Davies’ Toronto: “Even if you visit places mentioned in his novels, you will only see the buildings – you won’t inhabit them the way his characters did. Our most accurate guide…is (the writer’s) fictions and our imaginations.”