In the 1990s, a new ‘generation’ of Egyptian writers appeared on the literary scene in Cairo, including authors such as Mustafa Zikri, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Yasser Abdel-Latif, and Iman Mersal, and they often turned to independent literary journals as a common venue for debuting their works. Though the experimental writings of the so-called ‘nineties generation’ was originally marginalized, many have since become established authors with several books to their names. This paper takes as its focus the poet Hishām Qishṭah’s occasional journal dedicated to literary experimentation, al-Kitābah al-Uhkrá (Alternative Writing, 1991-2001), which I argue promoted the rise of this generation by providing the young writers with a place to publish and experiment on the page that lay outside of cultural institutions controlled by the government. While several scholars such as Sabry Hafez, Elisabeth Kendall, Samia Mehrez, Richard Jacquemond, and Hoda Elsadda have pointed to al-Kitābah al-Ukhrá as having influenced new writing that appeared over the course of its publication, the journal’s role has yet to be examined in depth. In this paper I situate the journal within the larger publishing scene in Cairo at that time and argue that the independence of the journal was integral to its ability to allow young writers to infiltrate the literary field and Cairo’s predominantly state-run publishing industry. Working at the intersection of literary analysis and book history, I consider examples of prose fiction by some of the aforementioned authors that appeared in al-Kitābah al-Ukhrá and were later expanded into book-length works published by local, independent publishing houses. I also bring my analysis into conversation with scholarship on the role of earlier, avant-garde Egyptian literary journals, particularly Jālīrī 68, a journal strongly affiliated with the well-known sixties generation who, by the nineties, had become the ‘old guard’ of Egyptian literature. The paper emerges from my dissertation research on this new generation of Egyptian writers and the intersections between their literature and the dynamic Cairene literary scene in which their works were published, circulated, and read. My presentation will be of interest to scholars of Arabic literature, Egyptian culture at the turn of the twenty-first century, and the broader field of postcolonial book history.