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 ...

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 sound of the banalities generally uttered about Simone Weil can already be heard in these few words by Simone de Beauvoir: “A great famine had just struck China, and they told me that Simone Weil ...

The Latin root of the word conjecture, conicere, means to throw things together. Think of Jackson Pollock splashing different paints onto a canvas and hoping for some kind of coherent result. In ...

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 ...

Gray, who as novelist and biographer has illuminated the mystery of human suffering (most recently in At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), was the perfect pick to write ...

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 ...

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