Five years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Hughes wrote Iron Man as entertainment to help their children Frieda and Nicholas deal with their mother’s death. The story is a fantasy about a colossal Iron Man (from somewhere unknown in the universe) with an appetite for...
Though it’s February and light snow is on the ground, Rose Burbank stops for a picnic. She’s romancing George Burbank, a good-hearted undemonstrative rancher. He’s thinking about his automobile and what it would be to have a more luxurious model, a...
O’Hara’s “A Few Trips and Some Poetry “is a long story about a picnic where the pleasure of sharing is sexual. O’Hara’s picnic-sex episode provides a memory that lasts a lifetime. What is served at this picnic is not the usual fare;...
Wolfe’s tale of murder unfolds when Rex Stout’s three-hundred-and-fifty-pound detective is to give a short speech at the United Restaurant Workers of America Fourth of July celebration at Culp’s Meadows, somewhere on Long Island. As narrated by...
Angelou fondly recalls the “summer picnic fish-fry” with characteristic high spirits. As narrated in her fictionalized memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou explains this was the biggest outdoor event of the year” in the African American Stamps, Arkansas....
The picnic celebrates Ada’s sexual awakening on her twelfth birthday. * It’s a picnic during which she initiates a life-long incestuous relationship with her older brother Van Veen. As a sign of her age, Ada wears a long but airy and ample black skirt with...
The picnic in McCarry’s The Secret Lovers, a Cold War spy-versus-spy novel, is a sly allusion to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. When Paul Christopher’s boss David Patchen complains that Impressionists bore him and “Picnics explain nothing,”...
The premise of Angle of Repose is that Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver Ward was no picnic. It’s a sad narrative without the pleasures and high spirits of a picnic. According to her grandson Lyman Ward, who writes her life story, Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver...
The Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is somewhere in Canada, where specialists pick through the debris left by careless Extraterrestrial picnickers. There is no picnic.The picnic is a metaphor offered by knowledgeable scientist Valentine Pillman to explain the...
Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...
