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 ...

THE NOTEBOOKS OF SIMONE WEIL (2 Vols., 648 pp.)—Translated by Arthur Wills—Putnam ($10). How does one get the reputation of a saint in the 20th century? Outside the Roman Catholic Church, where such ...

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 ...

The complicated lives and questing minds of Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil In the summer of 1933, four women, all in their 20s, were busy contemplating the meaning of ...

In 1949, France’s most prestigious publishing house, Gallimard, added a new book to a series called “Espoir.” At a time when espoir, or “hope,” in France was rationed as severely as bread, the name ...