This paper considers the interplay between ideas of spatial encounter, narrative mediation and excess in recent literary representations of the city of Lagos. In Noo Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012), the writer ends her journey and narrative at the Shrine, Fela Kuti’s music venue in Lagos. Summing up her feelings towards the city and Nigeria more broadly, she concludes that “it can be stylish, sublime, beautiful, yet no matter much it amazes or bedazzles you, it’s always that little bit jagga jagga” (309). Portraying her experience of Lagos as a complex encounter with multiple and overlapping evocations of excess, both dazzling and jagga jagga (“slang for ‘messed up’” (243)), Saro-Wiwa’s work indexes an important theme in literary portrayals of the city more generally. By offering a survey of Looking for Transwonderland and several other recent textual renderings of Lagos – including the novels Everyday is for the Thief (2007) by Teju Cole, Lagoon (2014) by Nnedi Okorafor and Blackass (2015) by A. Igoni Barratt – this paper demonstrates that the recurrence of such encounters with excess in these narratives express a significant facet of Lagosian realism. It argues that as these narratives construct the Lagosian conurbation as staging confrontations with various and intersecting forms of material, emotional and metaphysical overabundance, they both convey the complexity of the city and facilitate generative forms of narrative and subjective transformation. By imaginatively mediating the metropolis in this way, they also contribute to the distinctive and dynamic significance of Lagosian realism as a subgenre of Nigerian literature.