The work of the Egyptian novelists Khairy Shalaby and Ibrahim Aslan each explore the poetics of marginality through their use of humor and a deep sensitivity to the Egyptian vernacular. While other writers of the Sixties Generation experimented with formal innovation in their narrative styles—be it the use of realist or hyper-realist styles (Sonallah Ibrahim), historical realist (Gamal al-Ghitani), magical realist (Edwar al-Kharrat) or non-linear narration (Radwa Ashour), the fictions of Shalaby and Aslan (along with others such as Yahya Taher Abdullah) stand out for their commitment to incorporating the Egyptian dialect as a central vehicle for expressing the rich oral culture of the underclasses. This paper will explore this attentiveness to the colloquial as a type of literary language and as the language of a populist discourse that, in many ways, might be said to foreshadow the explosion of works in the nineties and millennial years written in the Egyptian colloquial. One might argue that in light of this proliferation of new fiction, the debate over the use of colloquial as a literary language largely seems to have become obsolete. As more young writers capitalize on using alternative venues for circulating their work and political ideas (i.e., independent presses, screenwriting, blogs and forms of signage), we have, as many other scholars have noted, increasingly witnessed an overall democratization of language within the Egyptian literary field. Revisiting the way in which the oral is represented textually through the artful contributions of Khairy Shalaby and Ibrahim Aslan will help contextualize the variation in Egyptian writing today where the fluid movement between cultural and linguistic registers is the new norm.