By reimagining William Faulkner’s 1954 visit to Brazil, Antônio Dutra’s Dias de Faulkner (2008) establishes a creative dialogue with Faulkner’s oeuvre while also inquiring into the author’s enigmatic personality. In the process Dutra’s narrative invites us to reflect on the complex and contradictory relationship between the writer as a private creator and as a public intellectual, on the phenomenology of reading, as well as on the interplay between history and fiction.