This chapter centers on three novels by Arab writers and one by a Lebanese writer: Syrian Ghada Samman's Bayrūt 75, Mu'nis al-Razzāz's Aḥyā' fī al-baḥr al-mayyit, Egyptian Shawq/ cAbd-l-Ḥakīm's Bayrūt: al-Bukā' laylan and Lebanese Rashid al-Daif's al-Mustabidd. These texts reveal the tension between the city as a cartographic entity as opposed to the city as a mental construction.

In Aḥyā' fī al-baḥr al-mayyit, Beirut is a city that has attracted intellectuals, writers, artists, revolutionaries and political activists seeking asylum from Arab dictatorial regimes. For those characters who come from various Arab countries, Beirut is a mythic locale of phantasmagoria, revolution, sexuality, empowerment and culture where the boundaries between the real and imagined city are slippery, shifting between the city as a physical space and a set of ideas gleaned from prevailing discourses on Beirut. Beirut is an active component of the action where the relationship between topography and cartography is problematic, revealing both the coincidence and disparity between the real and unreal city, and the way the city is perceived and conceived. Offering brief and scattered descriptions of the material city, Beirut is transformed into an essentially unreal city that emerges in a fragmentary manner, depending on the disposition of the walker and his frame of mind.

In Bayrūt 75, two Syrian characters, Yasmeena and Farah (that means “joy”), view Beirut as the city of their desires and aspirations and dream of success and wealth. From a distance, Beirut is an alluring female, promising sexual freedom, and an enchantress that will transform their lives; however, their hopes are soon dashed when they come face to face with the other nightmarish and destructive side of the city.

Al-Bukā' laylan is a novel about an Egyptian intellectual who finds himself in Beirut during the Israeli invasion and witnesses the displacements and massacres of ordinary people.