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...
Wunderlich’s surrealistic Das Frühstuck im Grünen [Luncheon on the Grass] is an adaptation of both Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Sensuality, sex, and pleasantries are absent. Distorted figures, resembling goats, sit in a barren landscape without the benefit...
Grass’s picnic in The Flounder is among the worst. Not only does he mock the accepted idea of a picnic, but he turns it topsy-turvy. It’s an ugly episode in which Sybille, aka Billie, is a variation of the Greek oracle/prophetess Sybil. According to Grass’ version,...
Trillin’s “Fly Frills to Miami” makes a picnic in an airplane “normal.” When Trillin’s wife Alice complains about travel expenses, Calvin decides to go cheap by purchasing food from New York to Miami. Based on “Alice’s...
Charles Bukowski’s “Some Picnic” is mean-spirited –what a picnic ought not to be. I rank it among the most unpleasant and psychologically cruel. When Bukowski says he, his girlfriend Jane and his parents picnicked and “made a...
Schlöndorff does his best to remain faithful to Grass’s mordant picnic satire. Grass was pleased: “In Schlöndorff, I found a true interlocutor, someone who provoked me with his questions, who delved into the heart of the subject, and who, during our dialogue, forced...
Wilfred Toadflax’s surprise birthday is a picnic feast of cakes, pies, jellies, and fruits. It’s the kind of high-carb meal that makes your teeth hurt. Mr. Apple’s grace suggests that the food is local, but not as he suggests from “our green...
Colgate’s The Shooting Party is a snapshot of English gentry circa October 1913 when Sir Randolph and Minnie Nettleby, the lord and lady of the manor, host one of their traditional fall shooting parties. A halt accompanies it on the hunt or midday break for luncheon....
Bridges’s hunt picnic is faithful to Isabel Colegate’s gently melancholy novel of English gentry circa 1913, The Shooting Party. The title The Shooting Party is intended to suggest the larger “shooting party” of the looming world war. Though they know it, Sir...
Picnic is the euphemism for a daylong eating orgy in Gordon’s Wilberforce Goes on a Picnic (1982). It’s the story of obese bears and a goat, who collectively devour mounds of hamburgers on rolls, sandwiches, a jar of catsup, a bowl heaped with mashed...
