My presentation, " Reading New Novels from Arabia with American Psycho and the Aesthetics of the Negative Sublime" will begin by addressing the failure of the "modernity project" in Arabic literature and will argue that the new wave of writing in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Arabia demonstrates another defiance to the modernist aesthetics. In the past decade, Saudi Arabia has witnessed the emergence of many young novelists; more than 200 novels published in Arabia since 2001. In my presentation, I will show how these texts do not coincide with or marvel at similar fictional and philosophical presuppositions as modernist authors; yet to dismiss this new writing as banal or decline is to fail to theorize its significance, and examine the fundamental aesthetic turn in the 21st century Arabic literary scene. How can we read this new flow of novelistic production in Arabia and theorize its aesthetic defiance? How do these writers reject or show the failure of the political and ideological master narrative that has fashioned Arabian society in the last century? Does this writing convey Adorno's "social protest against society"e My paper will address these questions and discuss the surge of this new writing and its anti-modernist aesthetics that is to say negative aesthetics while offering a reading of the negative sublime as a theoretical framework from which I can begin a comparative reading of "American Psycho" with three novels from Arabia, Abdulla Bin Bakhit, The Street of Ataif, Ibrahim Badi, Love in Saudi, and Seba Al-Herz, The Others. Like the American Psycho, these novels caused a stir, provoking scandal and outrage because they deploy confessional language to stage sexual violence, misogyny and boredom. If Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho displays a "dissenting voice" toward the yuppie society, exposing its cannibalistic desire and moral decay, these young novelists defy and subvert the fictional moral and religious narrative and their texts exhibit a desire for another type of consumption and internalization of the prohibited and outlawed. Likewise, the writing act, the revealing is hinged on violating prohibition and divulging a world of broken ethics. Yet this act of revealing exposes the paradox of normative ideals, pointing to the violence of political and ideological master narrative.