In 2002, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño published in the Las Últimas Notícias (Breaking News) newspaper a short story titled “Sobre la literatura, el Premio Nacional de Literatura y otros consuelos del oficio” (On literature, the national literature award, and other tricks of the trade), on the occasion of the granting of this award to the writer Volodio Teitelboim. With his usual irony, Bolaño, who certainly does not hold much respect for his colleague Teitelboim, author of a biography on Pablo Neruda, suggests that a national award would soon be given to Isabel Allende, the post-boom best-seller writer par excellence, before they give her the Nobel Prize. Bolaño's argument is irresistible:

If authors earlier faced the schizophrenia of opting between critical recognition and market sales, Bolaño's satire is directed at the fact of encountering, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new agreement between literary awards and honors, on the one hand, and the public's preferences, on the other. In the 1980s, this dilemma was still discussed in Brazil as a conflict between the market and the critical recognition of a generation that arose in the previous two decades. For the first time, the market thus seemed to promise growth indexes that were enough to make it possible for the fiction writer to professionalize, and in the 1984 essay titled “Prosa literária atual no Brasil” (Current literary prose in Brazil), Silviano Santiago advises that “the Brazilian novelist today needs to professionalize before becoming a professional of letters” ([1984] 1989, 29), that is, the writer needs to be prepared to face the dangers of a new commercial relation to the trade so as not to succumb to the temptation of assuming the digestible formats of market taste and abandoning the literary project and the quality standards of coherence and experimentation inherited from modernism.