Rhoda Penmark is a successful serial killer whose career begins at a school picnic. She looks innocent, a darling little girl with blond pigtails and blue eyes. But Rhoda’s interior is ruthless and murderous. Wanting the penmanship medal for herself...
The neat phrase “picnic, lightning” is a metaphor for transience and happenstance written by Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita (1955). Awaiting a murder trial, Humbert begins a memoir, freely admitting moral decline and obsession with the...
Newby’s Picnic At Sakkara is a comic novel set during political and international turmoil in Egypt. At the time of Newby’s action around 1946-47, the British were still in control of the Suez Canal, the Farouk regime was wobbling, and Egyptian nationalism led by the...
The picnic in Dick’s Eye in the Sky is characteristic of his style of mixing shifting planes of reality and illusion, laced with sardonic humor. The picnic takes when the real world collides accidentally with an alternate world it’s the result of an...
It’s a three-day dusty journey filled with “a continual tension in everything” when Don Fabrizio Corbèra and his family journey from Palermo to the hill town of Donnafugata. It’s unbearably hot and dusty. They stop at awful inns and eat putrid food. But on the third...
Among Lee’s vivid memories is a picnic by the sea, a grand event sponsored by the Slad church choir. It was a trek of fifty-one miles to Weston-Super-Mare that most of the townsfolk stuffed themselves into hired five charabancs [SHarəˌbaNG, -ˌbaNGk]. Lined up,...
Anticipating the forthcoming publication of Henderson the Rain King, Bellow offered a picnic metaphor he meant to set a boundary between substantial and superficial art. Thinking of E.M. Forster, he quips, “No good novelist is going to invite us to a picnic merely to...
According to Spark, Brodie might take the girls out for a lesson en plein aire in the Marcia Blaine school garden. It was a lesson and not a picnic. According to Ronald Neame’s film adaptation, there is a picnic sequence that is intended to be a recognition of...
Grass’s mordant picnic satire describes five dwarfs, all Nazis, all entertainers in Bebra’s “Theater at the Front,” gathering for a picnic feast on a beach in Normandy. The irony of pleasure is lost on them. Living in the present, Oskar and his friends are happy to...
There is a picnic in Terrence Young’s From Russia With Love (1963) but not in Ian Fleming’s novel. It’s inconsequential, shaken, but not stirred. See Terrence Young. From Russia With Love (1963). The screenplay by Richard Malbaum and Joanna Harwood is based on Ian...
