Beirut is a city that has often been described in the superlative mode. During its cosmopolitan heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Beirut was fêted for its legendary openness to the new, its adaptability, and its absorption of all sorts of cultural, social, and political change. When civil war broke out in 1975, Beirut and Lebanon quickly became a metaphor for the consequences of excess, and the death of a certain way of life. This dynamic of excess on both ends of the scale can perhaps be most quickly summarized in Etel Adnan's enduring image of a city that “was heedless to the point of folly. She gathered the manners and customs, the flaws and vengeance, the guilt and debauchery of the whole world into her own belly. Now she has thrown it all up, and that vomit fills all her spaces” (Adnan 2011: 20). In poetry, the city was elegized and mourned; as Elise Salem put it, “poets … competed to lament the tragedy of Beirut …, the new symbol of the Arab tragedy” ( Salem 2003: 137). In prose, the civil war era became most strongly associated with the rise of the experimental, fragmented urban novel. The end of the civil war in 1990, and the ushering in of a new era of hudūʾ nisbī – relative calm – brought with it new modes of writing about the city, exemplified in the work of authors like Hoda Barakat or Rashid Daʿif, whose post-war novels feature characters who often struggle with issues of sexuality, family, and mental illness. As many critics have pointed out, these novels also all perform a similar trope of commemoration in which the destroyed center of Beirut plays a central role.

Since Beirut and its literary imaginings have been so intertwined for so long, one of the questions this chapter asks is: If the violent crises and events of the 1970s and 1980s produced a tormented, fragmented literary prose that has been celebrated as an innovative way of processing and reproducing the tragedies of the civil war, and the 1990s brought forth, or continued to develop, a literature that Ken Seigneurie has characterized as an “elegiac humanism”– a literature of lament and mourning for a lost Beirut grounded in the wuqūf ʿalā al-ạṭlāl mode of classical Arabic poetry – then how can we characterize the prose of this decade, which attempts to contend with the realities of the post-war city?