In 2000, the academic community took note of his book, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning [1] , while the public at large came to know him through his blog, O Biscoito Fino e a Massa (in Portuguese), in which he discussed politics, pop culture, and literature.
In 2004, after the publication of The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics, Avelar was made a ‘full professor’ at Tulane University.
In November 2014, edited screenshots of personal, erotically charged messages between Avelar and two women who remained anonymous were published on the internet.
In 2016, he published Figuras de la violencia: ensayos sobre narrativa, política y música popular (Editorial Palinodia, Chile), and articles on the music of the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura (in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies) .
[12] Between 2014 and 2018, Avelar also published essays on recent Brazilian political processes in magazines such as the Luso-Brazilian Review, Transas (Buenos Aires), Lugar Comum (Rio de Janeiro), and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (London).
In his best known book, published in 1999, Avelar suggests that writing about the experience of a dictatorship is hindered by a form of recollection that is characteristic of the market, where the old is always entirely replaced with the new, leaving no traces of the connection between these two instances [13] .
The texts are unfoldings of articles previously published in media outlets such as Folha de São Paulo, Revista Fórum, and even Avelar's own blog, O Biscoito Fino e a Massa.
[18] The work examines the origins of the novel in the four great regions of Colombia: the Caribbean, the central area of Cundinamarca – including Bogotá -, the Valle del Cauca, and Antioquia.