On the Abolition Of All Political Parties

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was one of the first female graduates of the École Normale Supérieure. A Socialist, she volunteered to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, a mystical vision led her to convert to Roman Catholicism, though she refused the sacrament of baptism. She fled to the United States in 1942, where, in solidarity with the people of occupied France, she drastically limited her intake of food, so hastening her early death from tuberculosis. War and the Iliad by Weil and Rachel Despaloff, and translated by Mary McCarthy, is published by NYRB Classics.   Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. Over the course of his long, prolific career he published works in many genres, including criticism, fiction, memoir, and poetry. He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1980 received the Nobel Prize in Literature.   Simon Leys is the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and in 1970 settled in Australia. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney. Leys’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, and other periodicals. Among his books are The Hall of Uselessness (NYRB Classics), The Death of Napoleon (forthcoming from NYRB Classics in spring 2015), Other People’s Thoughts, and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, the Prix Guizot, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.