The cover of the new CD titled "Picaresque" from the group The Decemberists shows a theater stage with curtains drawn back.

NPR: A Journey with the Decemberists

Such picaresque tales enliven what could have been a dry subject.

WSJ: Book Review: The Futures

Svalbard once stood on the outermost limits of the known world and was a launching pad for some of the more picaresque tales of polar exploration.

BBC: Drawing near to the North Pole

Somewhere inside the sound and fury that have shrouded this project is a short, gross, and very funny series of sketches, lightly knotted together into a modern picaresque.

NEWYORKER: Borat

Whereas the Candide-like picaresque of the first half persuasively evokes life under brutal totalitarianism, the identity-switching and intrigue of the second part seem to originate in little more than the need to spin a yarn.

NEWYORKER: Dear Leader

The picaresque tale of two boys who are born at the precise moment that India shrugged off the British yoke in 1947 and are, therefore, "handcuffed to history" and to each other's fate has been condensed to fit the film's running time.

BBC: Midnight's Children evokes mixed responses in Toronto

Roth expands it into a rich Louisiana picaresque, ranging far and wide as Benjamin tastes romance in Russia with the wife of an English diplomat (a beguiling Tilda Swinton), comes off second-best in an encounter with a German U-boat, and pursues Daisy, the love of his life, first to New York and then to Paris.

CNN: Review: 'Benjamin Button' amazes, moves