10 most controversial authors (in recent memory)

These writers have all sold plenty of books – and taken quite a lot of flak.

2. E.L. James

Another female writer who burst onto the scene as a cultural phenomenon, E.L. James has achieved remarkable popular success. To date, her "50 Shades of Grey" books – which feature a romance that includes elements of sadomasochism and practices like bondage – have earned around a half a billion dollars, and that's before the release of the movies.

But for some in the literary community, the success of the erotic trilogy is nothing short of galling. When Publishers Weekly named E.L. James the 2012 "publishing person of the year" Ron Charles, fiction editor at The Washington Post, struck back with a hilarious video that mocked PW for "looking past the skin-deep issues of originality, significance, or originality" and choosing to honor James on the basis of "cold hard cash."

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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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