Banville’s The Sea is about a man’s untrustworthy memories—less about his dying wife and more about his sexual awakening when he was about eleven years old. Looking back, Max Morden realizes that his observations of the Grace family’s beach picnics...
The Madhur Jaffrey and Family at a Picnic (1940c.). Jaffrey is third from left in the front row. Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees, a Memoir (2005) describes her family’s picnic in Delhi in the 1940s before independence and partition. Jaffrey says...
Banksy’s satirical Picnic contrasts a group of indigenous African hunter-gatherers bewildered by the Picnic of a White middle-class urban family picnicking on the beach. The contrast between civilizations and technologies suggests irreconcilable differences...
Bridgland’s Forward, Conquer! We Have a Car and Can Picnic in the Country! Is part fun and part satire. Yet, whether Bridgland knows it or not, no other mode of transportation has boosted picnicking and helped make them ubiquitous. See Adam Bridgland. Forward,...
According to Stephen Frears, the Balmoral picnic is a glum episode as the Queen and family deal with the grief and notoriety resulting from the death of Princess Diana. Having retreated to Balmoral, a glum royal family tries to find solace outdoors. When the Queen...
Davis’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, is a picnic enigma based on the Greek myth of Prometheus. The best-known versions of which are Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BCE) and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Fire-Bringer (415 c. BCE). None...
Henley’s play Ridiculous Fraud climaxes with a family picnic in a cemetery. “Picnics in the graveyard! A great New Orleans tradition,” says Uncle Baites, “Why weep over the dead? We come, we go. We come, we go!” It is the annual Clay...
Talbott’s satire Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch of Tasty Treats (2007) evokes the Hollywood film noir. It’s a satire of the so-called cheesecake images of sexy women. Featured Image: David Russell Talbott. Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch...
Gavron’s picnic in Brick Lane retells Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi family, outwardly happy but inwardly troubled in London’s East End. After twenty years, Nazneen’s arranged marriage to Chanu Ahmed is wobbly. The picnic is supposed to be a lark, but it’s a kind of torture...
Fincher’s Zodiac adapts Robert Graysmith’s obsessive reporting of serial killings killed in the San Francisco Bay area, named after the killer who identified as Zodiac. The murders began at a picnic in 1968 and did not stop until 1978, by which time 37...
