About the Book

One of the most `modern' of eighteenth-century novels, Les Liasons Dangereuses is the brilliantly observed and vividly rendered story of two libertines and the innocent characters they plot to destroy.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

In the two hundred years since its original publication, Les Liaisons Dangereuses has provoked, on the one hand, shock and censorship, and on the other, the admiration of readers as different as Marie Antoinette, Andre Gide, and Charles Baudelaire. The story it tells of the intrigues of a pair of sexually carnivorous aristocrats in pre-Revolutionary France has yet to lose a particle of its power to disturb our moral peace.

About the Author

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses.

A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis de Sade or Nicolas-Edme Rétif. He was a military officer with no illusions about human relations, and an amateur writer; however, his initial plan was to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death"; from this point of view, he mostly attained his goals, with the fame of his masterwork Les Liaisons dangereuses . It is one of the masterpieces of novelistic literature of the 18th century, which explores the amorous intrigues of the aristocracy. It has inspired a large number of critical and analytic commentaries, plays, and films.