In this paper, I intend to examine the short fiction of Iraqi writer Mu?ammad Khu?ayyir (b. 1942) in light of Umberto Eco’s notion of “the open work” (l’opera aperta.) Although Khu?ayyir first gained prominence for his stories in the 1960s, his enigmatic, metafictional style was emblematic of the shift in Iraqi literature in the 1970s, when Iraqi writers broke with the dominant trend of social realist fiction that had characterized much Iraqi writing in the 1950s and 1960s. The shift in Iraqi fiction tracks closely with a broader societal, cultural and literary transformation that Sabry Hafez sees reflected in Arabic fiction written after 1960. Specifically, the “open work” describes a text in which the author deliberately employs indefiniteness and ambiguity, thus requiring the reader to collaborate in generating meaning. Thus, the “open work” forms part of a broader trend in 20th-century literary theory that de-emphasized the centrality of the author as creator of a text and its meaning. In particular, I will examine a select number of his short stories written in the 1970s, specifically, Manzil al-nis?? (“House of Women”), I?ti??r al-rass?m (“Death of the Artist”), and al-T?b?t (“The Coffin”), each of which can be read as an “open work,” in which Khu?ayyir uses ambiguity as a narrative strategy. As Eco has shown, a work’s “openness” can operate on more than one level: with “House of Women,” the story’s openness can be found in its doubled narrative (the story is structured as two parallel narratives, separated physically by a horizontal line across the middle of each printed page.) In “Death of the Artist” and “The Coffin,” the openness operates on the level of the narrative itself: in the latter, Khu?ayyir emphasizes the limited visual perspective of the narrator--a narrative reminder of the incomplete information provided by the author--and leaves it to the reader to determine (among other things) whether the narrator is in fact a ghost. Although Khu?ayyir’s fiction is never overtly political, I argue that his “open work” approach, which rejects a monologic authorial voice in favor of a mutual cooperation between author and reader, can be understood as a response to the oppressive political environment in which he (and other Iraqi writers who were and are his contemporaries) wrote.