In the picaresque tradition of Baccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Laurence Sterne, Jacques the Fatalist is an 18th-century French novel relating the adventures of a servant and his master as they journey through France on horseback. Around the central thread of Jacques' humorous narration of his romantic affairs, the author of the Encyclopedia and Rameau's Nephew fashions a signal work of innovative fiction that slyly investigates philosophical and literary questions such as art, time, reality, freedom, and the definition of the novel itself.

What happens on this journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is contantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realized that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.

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.