Dangerous Liaisons

There's a reason Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel keeps being remade into movies (not only 1988's deservedly celebrated Dangerous Liaisons, but 1989's Valmont and 1999's Cruel Intentions): it's a brilliantly constructed and breathtakingly unsparing expose of 18th-century French society that doesn't have much good to say about human nature in general. Constructed, like many of the earliest novels, out of a series of letters, but written with a scathing honesty (or cynicism) that made it nearly as scandalous as de Sade until the 20th century, Dangerous Liaisons, in Helen Constantine's 2006 translation, reads as fresh as ever.