Two of the most brilliant satires ever written, Candide and Zadig are also superb tales of adventure and action. Written in a clean, hard prose, they magically transport the reader to the four corners of Europe, the the New World and to the Levant.

Candide and Zadig are innocent young men who set out to test the lessons of the classroom in the outside world. The misfortunes that befall these youths—whether involving near-strangulation in Babylon, an earthquake in Lisbon or the wiles of swindlers in France—make for fascinating, delightful reading.

But they also provide Voltaire the opportunity to puncture the foibles of men, women, customs and institutions with the dazzling rapier thrusts of his incomparable irony. And they constitute a scathing indictment of the shallow optimism that characterized Voltaire's era.