The Sieve - New Edition

Hachette Antoine, under the Noufel imprint, is the exclusive publisher of the works of Mikhail Naimy, one of the most prominent contemporary Arab writers and Lebanese diaspora writers. His writings are characterized by their attempts to purify Arabic literature of embellishments and superfluous language, and to draw closer to depicting the reality of things and events. His style is characterized by simplicity, clarity, and frankness, and by its avoidance of exaggeration, especially in description, narration, and imagery. His vocabulary sometimes seems closer to the colloquial dialect, which increases the desire of readers of all ages to read his books. In this edition, Al-Gharbal is ninety years old. But, contrary to what years tend to do, they have only made him younger. Since its first publication in 1923, it remains, to this day, among Naimy's thirty-three works, one of the most widely distributed and best-selling.
The explanation for this, most likely, is that this book of literary criticism and critical theory, upon its publication, was not just a book, but also an event. This is because it marked the decisive turning point in Arab Renaissance literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century, between two intersecting approaches or eras: the dominant approach of the neoclassicists, who addressed their own and their nation's literary present, whether in poetry or prose, by turning to the past. Their production, through pure imitation, was a literature of form without content, or a body without a soul. Another approach was that of the modernists, whom Na'imah took it upon himself to revive in his sieve, so that they would be the vanguard of generations that would not only emerge from the captivity of their past, but would also work to make their own present an eternal past for a new present.
This book was, and remains, the constitution of literary modernity, and poetry in particular. It can be said that there is no significant Arab publisher or poet who does not have, in some corner of his cultural complex, a sieve.