Just shy of the centenary of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Taylor and the Shermans film is a musical. Becky Thatcher’s birthday picnic is recreated as rollicking July Fourth holiday picnic. It’s not Twain’s classic, but it’s light-hearted fun....
Exley’s semi-memoir Pages from a Cold Island, an homage to Edmund Wilson, describes his disastrous picnic on the Sugar River with Mary Polcar, Wilson’s “drinking, dinner, and movie companion,” and get her to talk about him. Exley’s...
Bainbridge’s idea of picnic fun is a biting satire of an English company picnic during which everything that can go awry does, including murder. Two friends, Brendass and Freda, organize a picnic for the employees at an Italian wine and spirits shop on Hope Street in...
Albee’s Seascape is set on a beach, the evolutionary boundary from which sea creatures emerged to walk on land. The action begins innocently. Charlie and Nancy Man are just finishing a picnic when they encounter two primordial green lizards, Leslie and Sarah,...
Yep’s Dragonwings is the story of Moon Shadow, who emigrates from China to San Francisco in 1903 to live with his father, Windrider. Together, they endure racial antagonism but prosper, supported by Windrider’s work in the family laundry and then as a handyman....
Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel about how the Valentine’s Day picnic of the Appleyard College girls ended badly. Inexplicably, two girls and a teacher disappear—and are never found. Weir and his screenwriter...
Appleseed Rectory is the site of Amis’s relentlessly unpleasant picnic that defiantly upends expectations. * The picnic is Quentin’s idea of fun for his guests, a free-wheeling and animated by alcohol and drugs. He says to his wife Celia, “I thought...
Lewis’s food memoir includes happy memory of a Revival Sunday Dinner, aka “Second Sunday,” in her hometown of Freetown, Virginia, in the 1930s. Cooking was done by women, while the men attended church but returned home to pack the family and the food so that it would...
Steig’s juvenile novel Abel’s Island (1976) is a Robinsonade, the adventure of Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint a mouse stranded for a year on an island in a river. Like Robinson Crusoe, Abel manages to live off the land and returns to his former life chastened but...
Simon Boulderstone, a British lieutenant, serving during the North African campaign, is among the major characters of Manning’s The Battle Lost and Won. Cutting short a leave, Boulderstone wanders, trying to regain his unit and rejoin the fighting against Rommel at El...
