Casual readers usually neglect Christie’s poems, but her inner life is there and not in Marple’s or Poirot’s. “Picnic 1960” suggests Christie never lost her sense of her good life. In the final poem of the volume, Christie makes the case...
Fellini’s scampagnata, picnic, in Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical narrative, tells about an ordinary alfresco lunch set in the shade of the yard of a farmhouse. What is served is unknown, but there are bottles of raffia-bound Chianti, a bowl of hard-boiling eggs,...
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...
Fowles’s The Ebony Tower is a sendup of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Although a boat is in the background, it is uncertain how Manet’s picnickers arrived for their dejeuner sur l’herbe. Fowles’ version of the picnic is definitive; the...
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...
If you call it a picnic, it’s a picnic. Who is to argue with Rosalie Gascoigne when she explained her sculpture is based on an actual picnic organized by James Mollison. It was held on a mountain on a windy day. So, the wire netting captures air; the birds...
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,...
Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975has two picnics fifty years apart. The narrative concerns the lives of two unfulfilled English women in Satipur, a town amidst the heat and dust of the plains in Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. In 1923, Olivia Rivers visits...
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....
