Nikil Saval
WILLIAM CALLEY’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, in a wealthy neighborhood of Miami, was uneventful. He was short—five foot three—and came to weigh around 130 pounds. Because he had reddish hair, he was given the nickname Rusty. He got into trouble, in the normal way of teenagers, but never with drugs or violence. He had friends. Things took a turn for the worse: diabetes afflicted his father, cancer his mother. The family business (construction) failed; they moved from Miami to their vacation home in North Carolina. Calley returned to Miami to complete high school. He graduated at the bottom of his class. He By the end of his life, the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris—universally known by his nom de pinceau, Le Corbusier—had emerged from decades of frustrated plans, encircled by controversy and dismissal, to become the world’s most renowned architect. For a man who had devised three hundred projects but seen only seventy-eight of them built, the high-profile commissions that belatedly started pouring in proved a glorious bounty: the National Museum of Western Art for Tokyo; a church, apartment building, and elementary school for Firminy, France; the Olivetti tower outside Milan; a mixed-use project for thirty-five acres of undeveloped land along the Hudson Istanbul, 1959. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) endured one of the most thoroughgoing modernization drives of the twentieth century—Kemal Atatürk’s revolution in Turkey, which left few areas of cultural life untouched. Over several years in the 1920s, Atatürk completed an aggressive Westernizing campaign intended to erase any semblance of indigenous or Islamic culture: He ended the […] 
When the English translation of Mo Yan’s novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) was published in 2004, it was seen by some critics as his bid for global literary prestige. It hit all the right notes: it was a historical saga of modern China featuring a proliferation of stories, it was unceasingly violent and nasty, and it came near to puncturing Party myths. In the preface, Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan’s longtime translator and advocate, reported that it had provoked anger on the mainland among ideologues for humanizing the Japanese soldiers who invaded Manchuria, though there can’t have been very 
The title of Neel Mukherjee’s latest novel recalls V. S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize–winning collection In a Free State, from 1971. Like Naipaul’s book, which consists of two stories and the titular novella, bookended by sections of documentary observation, Mukherjee’s is not a novel in the sense we might recognize, though it is being called one. It, too, is made up of five parts, more like long episodes than complete narratives. But the departure from the novel form is superficial. All of these episodes are set in India, and feature minor characters we glimpse in passing and then learn more about 
Toward the middle of his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina recalls an anticolonial reverie he experienced while getting drunk in a cheap bar in Nairobi as a young man. He had just read Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, which had been banned by the Kenyan government. “It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language,” Wainaina writes. “English is the language of the colonizer.” He dreamed of abandoning his professional life entirely, giving up on his plans to