How to Use picaresque in a Sentence

picaresque

1 of 2 adjective

• Jim Harrison reviewed this picaresque tale of a young writer on the brink of success for The Times — and loved it.
  — Tina Jordan, New York Times, 26 Mar. 2021
• Some critics accused him of recycling his picaresque plots and ideas, which at times seemed to verge on the nihilistic.
  — Harrison Smith, Washington Post, 14 Sep. 2017
• Politics, commerce, romance, and mystery all play a role in a novel that can best be defined as picaresque.
  — Weston Williams, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 2017
• More than that, Jacobsen has arranged her story in a kind of nonfiction picaresque novel.
  — Dick Teresi, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2017
• After Cabortes throws him out, Pattie makes his way to Monterey and has more picaresque adventures, including taking part on both sides of a minor civil war.
  — Gary Kamiya, SFChronicle.com, 1 May 2020
• There are picaresque detours, slapstick-heavy set pieces and a thick veneer of corporate-culture satire, mostly aimed at the Great Beyond’s overseers, each one a marvel of translucent forms and squiggly lines.
  — Justin Chang Film Critic, Los Angeles Times, 22 Dec. 2020
• The White Tiger is a picaresque tale of an Indian man’s escape from poverty to business success, and of ambition being muddied by morality.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2022
• Elements of picaresque comedy blended with pop culture references to create one of the most soul-satisfying shows of the year.
  — Kerry Reid, chicagotribune.com, 18 Dec. 2017
• Two lithographs from 1827 by European visitors to Rio, capital of the new empire of Brazil, depict picaresque street scenes crowded with traders, monks, hawkers and slaves.
  — Jason Farago, New York Times, 18 Apr. 2018
• But think of Rain Dogs as an almost (and sometimes entirely) picaresque mother-daughter vagrant journey across England.
  — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Mar. 2023
• Predictably, Armbruster's picaresque plot eventually finds a way of thawing the frosty impasse between the two men, but the road to reconciliation is pleasingly bumpy and steep.
  — Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter, 30 June 2019
• Here the picaresque nineteenth-century adventures of his previous book are replaced by the tale of a fifty-one-year-old man in 2011 buying a large notepad and trying to write a long account of himself for his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Maggie.
  — James Walton, The New York Review of Books, 21 Sep. 2022
• Of course, in his picaresque travelogue of Texan political activism, O’Rourke is also telling his own story — as a careful listener and tireless avatar of all those who have fought against injustice, past and present.
  — Lee Drutman, Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2022
• Its astonishing energy comes from the contrast between its perky, picaresque structure and its muscular, high-flying prose.
  — Jesse Green, New York Times, 7 June 2019
• Pennell tells this meandering, local picaresque tale with low-key emotions that rise very high through his distinctive eye for idiosyncratic behavior (as in the very first scene, of Frank sleeping off a bender on Lloyd’s pool table).
  — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2020
• The film might charitably be labeled challenging, more of a puzzle than a story, an invitation to the audience to do some work interpreting its bizarre picaresque journey.
  — Kyle Smith, wsj.com, 20 Apr. 2023
• Fielding's is a picaresque novel, an early literary genre which focuses on a roguish but lovable underdog hero on a series of adventures.
  — Emma Dibdin, Town & Country, 4 Apr. 2023
• Eventually, it’s revealed that Agnès invented the Kingdom of Air Currents — the fantasy world where all her stories are set — as a way of preserving the memory of her late sister, which brings a note of melancholy to the otherwise picaresque format.
  — Peter Debruge, Variety, 12 June 2023
• Hendrickson decided to translate Covarrubias after using the Treasure to look up a word in Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous picaresque novella sometimes attributed to his father.
  — Julian Lucas, Harper's magazine, 25 Nov. 2019
• Brilliantly written by Daniel Nayeri and beautifully illustrated by Daniel Miyares, this rollicking picaresque brims with drama, humor and a kind of giddy joy at the charms and weirdnesses of human nature.
  — Meghan Cox Gurdon, WSJ, 6 Dec. 2023
• That premise launches the main character into a series of picaresque adventures primarily involving Suder's interest in and pursuit of jazz music.
  — John Warner, chicagotribune.com, 27 June 2017
• Every classic ’70s road movie offered a picaresque survey of cultural differences that illustrated the multiplicity of American life.
  — Armond White, National Review, 27 Nov. 2019
• Jim Harrison reviewed this picaresque tale of a young writer on the brink of success for The Times — and loved it.
  — Tina Jordan, New York Times, 26 Mar. 2021
• Some critics accused him of recycling his picaresque plots and ideas, which at times seemed to verge on the nihilistic.
  — Harrison Smith, Washington Post, 14 Sep. 2017
• Politics, commerce, romance, and mystery all play a role in a novel that can best be defined as picaresque.
  — Weston Williams, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 2017
• More than that, Jacobsen has arranged her story in a kind of nonfiction picaresque novel.
  — Dick Teresi, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2017
• After Cabortes throws him out, Pattie makes his way to Monterey and has more picaresque adventures, including taking part on both sides of a minor civil war.
  — Gary Kamiya, SFChronicle.com, 1 May 2020
• There are picaresque detours, slapstick-heavy set pieces and a thick veneer of corporate-culture satire, mostly aimed at the Great Beyond’s overseers, each one a marvel of translucent forms and squiggly lines.
  — Justin Chang Film Critic, Los Angeles Times, 22 Dec. 2020
• The White Tiger is a picaresque tale of an Indian man’s escape from poverty to business success, and of ambition being muddied by morality.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2022
• Elements of picaresque comedy blended with pop culture references to create one of the most soul-satisfying shows of the year.
  — Kerry Reid, chicagotribune.com, 18 Dec. 2017

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picaresque

2 of 2 noun

• For the first time, women were at the center of the picaresque.
  — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 22 May 2019
• The Summer Thieves is a picaresque adventure modeled on the work of Jack Vance.
  — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 20 Aug. 2021
• Or at least, that’s the most generous reading of this perverse picaresque.
  — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2022
• At least twice the book nods in the direction of Cervantes, who surely learned, by putting his Quixote through so many perils, that the picaresque carries perils of its own.
  — Louis Bayard, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2022
• But its two-hour runtime compressed Rice’s vampire picaresque in a way that undermined the book’s languid, Southern gothic pace.
  — Time, 27 Oct. 2022
• This parodic picaresque finds Sturges at the zenith of his formidable powers to abrade and delight.
  — Washington Post, 31 July 2021
• In fact, the book is Cervantes’s satire of literary tropes (including the novel of chivalry, epic poetry, the pastoral novel, and, to a lesser degree, the picaresque).
  — The New Yorker, 18 July 2022
• It is called the novel of the picaresque, which is an adventure story where the main character travels around, usually with a sidekick, and has adventures.
  — Randy Blaser, chicagotribune.com, 8 June 2017
• At his or her best, a serial impostor lives out a real-life picaresque, a thrillingly disjointed string of dramatic episodes.
  — Sadie Stein, Town & Country, 26 Feb. 2017
• Can a 21st-century writer of topical take-no-prisoners satires find happiness in the quaint but rollicking form of the 18th-century picaresque?
  — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 7 Mar. 2018
• The Failure, a picaresque story about two guys who plan to rob a Korean check cashing store in order to finance the prototype for a ridiculous internet application.
  — Mike Postalakis, SPIN, 3 Aug. 2022
• Le Chevalier’s manuscript—written in (eccentric) French, the lingua franca of diplomacy, one of his ephemeral métiers—has its own picaresque history.
  — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 20 June 2022
• His long-suffering, vegetarian girlfriend, Diana, is along for the ride, and the story is a freewheeling picaresque rich with character and joyful writing.
  — Oliver Staley, Quartz, 23 Oct. 2020
• Brás Cubas, a deceased character born in 1805 who never achieved grace or glory, reflects on his picaresque life, multiple failures, and equally numerous delusions.
  — Farah Abdessamad, The Atlantic, 12 Apr. 2022
• Ralph Breaks the Internet, like all good picaresques, meanders a bit during its journey, stopping to take several little detours that aren’t strictly necessary.
  — Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 21 Nov. 2018
• Granados crafts a picaresque of art galleries, SoHo lofts, and Hamptons mansions, deftly satirizing the wealthy without denying the value of what wealth can buy: gorgeous clothes, superb champagne, easy confidence.
  — The New Yorker, 18 Oct. 2021
• As chaos descended, her family scattered, and Kukielka embarked on a series of darkly picaresque adventures.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 15 Apr. 2021
• But the picaresque novel, as Cervantes would have understood it, is characterized by the first-person narration of a poor individual—the picaro—who relates his own misadventures and misdeeds.
  — The New Yorker, 18 July 2022
• This picaresque satire set in Russia's early aughts exposes the absurdity of totalitarianism when David, an investment banker who goes bust because of Enron, moves to Russia and is caught in a dizzyingly absurd plot.
  — Barbara Vandenburgh, USA TODAY, 10 Dec. 2022
• That's another cinematic tradition Guadagnino is locking into: the American picaresque as seen through a touristing European's eyes.
  — A.a. Dowd, Chron, 23 Nov. 2022
• That notion of American openness, of ever-fractalizing free will, coming up against the fickle realities of fate is the tension that powers Towles’ exciting, entertaining and sometimes implausible picaresque.
  — Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times, 5 Oct. 2021
• Berger's philosophically dense picaresque is a prime opportunity for a gifted solo performer.
  — F. Kathleen Foley, latimes.com, 3 Nov. 2017
• Ibsen’s next work, Peer Gynt (1867), a stunning picaresque that lampoons Norwegian peasant life, provincialism, and greed, was also enthusiastically received.
  — Andrew Katzenstein, Harper's magazine, 16 Sep. 2019
• For the first time, women were at the center of the picaresque.
  — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 22 May 2019
• The Summer Thieves is a picaresque adventure modeled on the work of Jack Vance.
  — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 20 Aug. 2021
• Or at least, that’s the most generous reading of this perverse picaresque.
  — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2022
• At least twice the book nods in the direction of Cervantes, who surely learned, by putting his Quixote through so many perils, that the picaresque carries perils of its own.
  — Louis Bayard, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2022
• But its two-hour runtime compressed Rice’s vampire picaresque in a way that undermined the book’s languid, Southern gothic pace.
  — Time, 27 Oct. 2022
• This parodic picaresque finds Sturges at the zenith of his formidable powers to abrade and delight.
  — Washington Post, 31 July 2021
• In fact, the book is Cervantes’s satire of literary tropes (including the novel of chivalry, epic poetry, the pastoral novel, and, to a lesser degree, the picaresque).
  — The New Yorker, 18 July 2022

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024