Historical fiction has been a mainstay of Syrian literary history throughout the 20th century. Historical fictions broadly speaking yield multiple readings and functions, such as filling in historical gaps left out by official histories; cooption by the State as exemplars of the past to influence the present; to provide alternative versions of major historical events, inscribing peripheral, ignored, and often minority voices into the historical record. Notably, these works tend to adhere to mimetic renderings of these events. Very generally speaking, before the onset of the 2011 revolution that has resulted in the dismantling of numerous socio-political and cultural foundations, minimal experimental fiction had been produced in Syria (Selim Barakat and much prison literature being among the few exceptions). Situating the analysis in a theoretical framework of neo-historical fiction, this paper will explore the relationship of experimental writing to historical fictions. A sub-genre of contemporary historical novels, neo-historical fiction is not a mere return to a historical epoch, but rather a self-conscious return to re-tell, re-investigate, re-analyze, and as such even re-historicize. Looking closely at a handful of novels (limited to al-Rahib’s Rasamtu khattan fi-l-ramal, 1999 and Haydar’s Marathi al-ayyam, 2001 at the time of this writing), the paper intends to address the following issues and questions: How does history fit into the fiction? What is the interplay between the history, narrative, and aesthetic? What are the modes of experimentation the fictions project and what may that tell us of their contemporary moments? By focusing on the experimental within one genre of literary production, this paper hopes to participate in a larger discussion that historicizes modernist tendencies in Syrian literature.