This paper will address the work of the contemporary Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir (b. 1942), whose literary output consists primarily of enigmatic short stories and essayistic pieces that combine elements of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. A life-long resident of Basra, Khuḍayyir frequently evokes the city in his writings, either by relating or re-imagining forgotten incidents from its past or by referring to a narrator’s own memories. He has also created a fictional counterpart for Basra—an identical twin known as Basrayatha, which first appeared as the subject of his 1993 novel of the same name. Basrayatha also appears in his more recent stories, which seem to share the same fictional universe. I argue that Khuḍayyir’s evocation of the local is part of his literary project to create an “imagined community” of readers. As a Iraqi writer who has refused to abandon his city through eight years of the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War, the sanctions era, and the years of violence and uncertainty in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Khuḍayyir understandably seeks refuge in the local and the past in the face of a public sphere characterized by decades of violence and authoritarianism. In contrast to the often heavy-handed social realist mode that marked Iraqi literature in the 1950s and 1960s, Khuḍayyir’s ambiguous, labyrinthine fiction—often drawing on elements of magical realism, surrealism, and science fiction—is constructed so as to maximize the participation of the reader in creating literary meaning. In this light, Khuḍayyir’s stories can be usefully examined through the lens of reader response theory, as developed in the writings of Stanley Fish and others. By framing Khuḍayyir’s texts as a structure that invites the reader to assist in the construction of meaning—even if the reader’s responses are guided by the structures the author has laid out—it is possible to see his writings as a call to envision alternatives to contemporary reality.