His first novel, El Apartado (1975) made him popular in his own country and also won a prize awarded by the literary and artistic café Bar-Baró.
In 1978, his second novel, Un día perfecto, was published in Barcelona and quickly became a best seller with over thirty thousand copies sold, a considerable amount for that time.
A year later, in 1979, Rabanal received a Fulbright scholarship to participate in the International Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in the United States, which allowed him to leave Argentina during the military rule.
Other books by him are: No vaya a Génova en invierno (stories), Los peligros de la dicha and the novels El factor sentimental (1990), Cita en Marruecos (1995), which won the prize "Los Trece" of Buenos Aires and was also Rómulo Gallegos prize finalist, La mujer Rusa (2004) y El héroe sin nombre (2006).
In April 2014 he published La vida Escrita, a development of two decades of personal notes about the life of a writer and his country.
He has published a book of essays and a travelogue La Costa Bárbara (2000) and a children's novella Noche en Gondwana (1988).