This paper takes as its subject of analysis the fictional works of three modern Arab writers: Ibrahim al-Koni, Abdelrahman Munif, and Ghassan Kanafani. In particular, I study as desert literature The Bleeding of the Stone, Endings, and All That’s Left to You, written by al-Koni, Munif and Kanafani, respectively. I define those novels in relation to the conceptual triad of modernity, the nation-state, and the novel, delineating how they depart from, and challenge, the most sustainable theorizations of the three nodes of the triad. Collectively, these novels challenge ontological definitions of modernity that either locate it in a specific geographical area or describe it according to a certain set of technological advances. Instead, they promote a relational understanding of modernity in which alterity is not necessarily key to the encounter with the other. This way, modernity becomes forever restless, sliding, resisting settling down, much like the desert itself. In addition, these novels reject the expectations of politically committed and nationalistic literature often governing postcolonial contexts. Rather, they complicate the conception of the nation-state and hardly lend themselves to a nationalistic allegorical reading. Moreover, the novels of al-Koni, Munif and Kanafani present serious contests to generic and formalistic conventions of the novel, especially in its realist strain. Rather, they employ a wide array of aesthetics, most notably intertextuality, magical realism, palimpsestic time, storytelling, and border aesthetics, that are informed by the desert, both as a topographical and conceptual space. In this sense, these novels establish an antidote to what Aidan Tynan calls “wasteland aesthetics,” in which the desert functions as a speculative terrain against which modern Western literature and philosophy test themselves. Reading these desert novels as world literature, I dwell on the challenges that the novels in question bring to the Eurocentric assumptions that continue to predominate in the field, especially the work of Franco Moretti, Fredric Jameson, John Updike, and others.