4 writers who take chances with their novels

These four writers have all crafted books utterly different from anything else you've read.

2. 'The Book of Embraces,' by Eduardo Galeano

If you take the molds for historian, poet, critic, storyteller, journalist, novelist, and artist and blend them all together, what or who, you’d have is Eduardo Galeano. He is an author who defies categorization, and his books are written across the boundaries of genre. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940, Galeano’s work chronicles the history, or perhaps more aptly, the experience of Latin America. “I'm a writer obsessed with remembering,” says Galeano, “with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

"The Book of Embraces" is a mosaic of vignettes, meticulously laid out – poetry next to autobiography, next to political commentary, pushed up against allegory and myth. Galeano is a wonderous and radical storyteller, whose brainchild – whose veritable book of wonders – is an articulation of just where the limits of language and storytelling lie.

"The Book of Embraces" has a vast and visionary scope but also an intensely intimate one. His musings are as much about love and loss as they are about justice and the chasm of history.

"When it is genuine,” Galeano writes, “when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice.... Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others." In his writing, he creates worlds nestled within worlds, and with a flourish of his pen, he invites us in. He bids us “turn loose the voices, undream the dreams,” and, caught up in his writing, you do. He leaves you no other choice.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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