Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

In J. Robert Loy’s smooth and accurate translation (the first in English except for a privately printed one of 1798), the reader can now discover the originality of Diderot’s witty masterpiece. It is a book that no one interested in the evolution of modern fiction, or the ideas of the Enlightenment, will want to miss.

What happens on the journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is constantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to ...