Six of the best fictional vacations

Chip Cheek's new novel is Cape May.

At LitHub he tagged six favorite fictional vacations, including:

Christopher Castellani, Leading Men

Much of the action of Christopher Castellani’s latest novel, which centers on the real-life relationship between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, involves the hijinks of glamorous writers and filmmakers as they gallivant around the Italian Riviera. We follow them to a party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino; we frolic with them in the Ligurian Sea; we narrowly escape with them from a pack of feral youths; we see one of them, the writer John Horne Burns, succumb to a strange illness and die. Throughout these scenes, a powerful source of tension comes from the fact that we’re getting the story primarily from Frank Merlo’s perspective—the perspective of an average man attached to a legendary playwright, subject to the great man’s whims and mood swings. It’s a glamorous life Frank is leading, a free-flowing, never-ending vacation of sorts, but he’s trapped in it, without any power over its direction, and the consequences reverberate across the decades. This is a sweeping, rapturously beautiful novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue