Initially dismissed for turning away from the national collective, Egypt’s “nineties generation” of writers has since attracted scholarly attention challenging earlier claims that their literature was apolitical. These studies typically examine either the texts themselves (through close reading) or the larger literary field in which the writers participated (through sociology of literature). This paper takes a different approach by examining how these literary texts reflexively engage with significant shifts in the production and circulation of Egyptian literature that occurred during the 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that using this method allows us to see not only a change in literary style, but a major shift in the paradigm of authorship itself during this period. As a case study of these larger changes, this paper explores depictions of the figure of the author in Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s novel al-Fa‘il (2008; A Dog with No Tail, 2009), a quintessential example of nineties-generation fiction. Through close readings of key passages, I investigate the literary strategies Abu Golayyel employs to variously erase, blur, and signal the absence of the literary author’s traditional roles of reflecting and reforming the nation through his/her literature. This semiautobiographical novel features a narrator-protagonist also named Hamdi Abu Golayyel, a young Bedouin who has moved away from his village in the Fayoum to Cairo, where he works as a day laborer and an aspiring writer. From the first page, Abu Golayyel’s sardonic humor provides sharp criticism of wide-scale state corruption in Egypt, especially as experienced by marginalized Bedouin communities. He uses the same dry wit to expose the ineffectiveness of the writer/intellectual who, in the form of the narrator, loudly—and insincerely—announces his intention and ability to counter such corruption. Abu Golayyel thus reveals authorship to be not a sacrosanct vocation, but a performance, and one that often is metafictional. Paying particular attention to modes of performance of authorship and allegories of reading in al-Fa‘il, I demonstrate how Abu Golayyel effectively demotes the literary author, rejecting the idea of author as enlightened voice of the nation. The text offers, instead, a new mode of authorship that engages the reader, through humor and metafiction, in dismantling outdated, ineffective notions of political engagement predicated on the nation, as it gestures toward new roles and collectivities defined outside of nationalist terms.