Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946)

Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946)

Christie’s picnic at Kawkab in Syria was indelible because the dessert was in bloom. During an archeological dig in 1934 (?), Christie and Max Mallowan* packed a lorry named Queen Mary for sightseeing at Kawkab, a hill about 300 meters high. They expected an...
Michel Leiris’s Manhood: A Journey, or  L’Age d’homme (1946)

Michel Leiris’s Manhood: A Journey, or L’Age d’homme (1946)

Leiris’s autobiographical exposé of trying to make sense of his emerging Manhood includes an episode of when he got his first erection at a family picnic in a Paris park. He was six or seven years old, and  at the time, he recalls, he “established no direct relation...
M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Pleasures of Picnics” (1957)

M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Pleasures of Picnics” (1957)

Fisher sets rules for picnics in stone. In “The Pleasures of Picnics,” she declares people who do not like picnics must be “dismissed immediately.” Fisher’s “true” picnic (and maybe yours?) must be outdoors and away from home....
NASA’s Gemini 3 Spacecraft (1965)

NASA’s Gemini 3 Spacecraft (1965)

NASA’s space food makes a picnic. Aboard Gemini 3, “The Molly Brown,” Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and John Young rocketed and enjoyed a picnic of corned beef sandwiches purchased at a local deli in Cocoa Beach. As Grissom began to eat it, the...
Robertson Davies’s “What Every Girl Should Know” (1978)

Robertson Davies’s “What Every Girl Should Know” (1978)

Davies’s picnic wit is a metaphor in is this advice about sexual mores to an assembly at his daughter’s school: “A girl who thinks love affairs are less trouble than a marriage is probably also the kind of girl who thinks that picnics are simpler than dinner parties....
Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte (2004)

Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte (2004)

Hesser’s “Fine Dining in the Sky,” from Cooking for Mr. Latte, A Food is a fussy gourmet’s admission that she packs a bulky in-flight bag as if it was a flying coach a picnic cooler. She wants us to believe that she for a flight to Spain, she...

Judith Martin’s Miss Manners’ Guide (2005)

Martin’s advice (always with humor) for picnics is the chapter for “Outdoor Eating.” Here it is: It is true that some rules for eating outdoors are different from those that apply indoors. For example, it is permissible to execute extraneous wildlife found crawling...
Joe McGuiness’s Blind Faith (1989)

Joe McGuiness’s Blind Faith (1989)

McGinnis’s’ Blind Faith is dramatized reportage of a New Jersey murder case in which Rob Marshall was accused of hiring hitmen to free himself to marry his flamboyant mistress. According to McGuiness, when Marshall thought something was wrong with one of...