Editor’s note: The ninth annual Brattleboro Literary Festival gets under way on Friday, Oct. 1. Below is the next in a series of reviews of books by authors who will be attending the 2010 Brattleboro ...

Let’s just get this out of the way: any book about Simone Weil is, for one reason or another, worth reading. That might sound like too bold a claim, but some figures engender this sort of response.

It’s a commonplace to note the contradictions in Simone Weil’s life. She was an anarchist and a conservative, a pacifist and a war fighter, a French patriot and a critic of France, a Jew who was ...

As a teenager, Simone Weil thought about killing herself. The reason? She could no longer keep up with her older brother André at math. “I didn’t mind having no visible successes,” she later explained ...

Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, Simone Weil, Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics, 134 pages. Is Simone Weil “relevant”? She’s certainly not in the way we typically use the word, meaning a ...

In 1943, two of the century’s most original thinkers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil—found themselves in bomb-battered London, looking for medical work to help the war effort. Though they never ...

In 1957, when Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm, a reporter asked him which writers he felt the closest to. He gave two names: his close friend Rene Char and the ...