In his introduction to Trevor Le Gassic’s 1997 translation of ‘Awdat al-Ta’ir ila-l-Bahr (Days of Dust) by Palestinian novelist Halim Barakat, Edward Said stresses the inextricability of the link that binds the development of the Arabic novel as a literary form to the monumental Arab losses of 1948 and 1967. These calamitous defeats, Said argues, put in question the very notion of an Arab present, which became conjectural after the naksa (1967) especially, suspended between a past of disaster and a future of uncertainty. In an attempt to affirm the ephemeral now, novelists joined the heroic effort by Arab writers of all genres to creatively reconstitute the present scene-by-scene and thus simultaneously implicated the trajectory of the Arabic novel in a dialectical relationship with the crisis of a fleeting post-naksa reality. Building on Said’s argument, I focus on Halim Barakat’s ‘Awdat al-Ta’ir ila-l-Bahr and Elias Khoury’s Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun) in order to examine the literary craft by which each author constructs the genesis of the Arab present. Through my comparative analysis of figurative language, imagery and allusion, I argue that both Barakat and Khoury’s modes of originating their respective contemporaneities indicate the specific historical dilemmas that faced each author. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the naksa and therefore forced to create from nothing, Barakat devises his textual universe through a method of parodic reflection. By ironically alluding to canonical Western texts as inversions of his post-1967 surroundings, Barakat conjures the Arab present as a cohesive amalgam of recurring counter-images. In contrast, Khoury’s creative approach derives from his temporal location at the death of the last native-born Palestinian generation, whose heroic history his novel seeks to preserve. Through his narrative technique of fusion, Khoury dissolves the boundaries between past and present, thereby engendering a reality that unites the legacy of the dying with the unstable identity of the living. Although the modalities of each novelist’s endeavor differ, I show how both Barakat and Khoury similarly fashion their particular genesis scenes in ways that alert the reader to her status as the creation’s ultimate witness and, by implication, as the agent of its fulfillment. Such cooperative engagement of the reader by both authors suggests that the development of the Arabic novel as a textual medium of the post-naksa endeavor to reconstruct the Arab present formed the act of reading novels (not just writing them) into an activist enterprise.