In it, he documented his life as a “kitchen slave” at Babbo, one of Mario Batali’s Manhattan restaurants, and his adventures learning the art of Tuscan butchery from a flamboyant eighth-generation Italian butcher.īatali was a huge piece of the book, which at the time was quite an asset. (A nod to Buford’s literary cred: early in Thugs he writes about attending his first English football match with two unnamed friends he says they were Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa.)īuford’s second book, Heat (2006), was a bestseller. He left Granta to take over the fiction editor post at an obscure little periodical called the New Yorker.īy then Buford had published his well-received Among the Thugs (1992), a horrifying and very funny study of English football violence in the 1980s. His last issue was in 1995, and during his time at the magazine, it became the kind of publication you’d find in the hands of very discerning readers who were serious about their literature. At Cambridge, in 1979, he founded Granta.

He later went to UC Berkeley and then to Cambridge. His dad was in the Air Force, and a posting took the family to Southern California when Buford was five. In any event, he’s a nice guy (seriously, check out his Twitter), quick to smile.īuford was born in Baton Rouge, La. And yet, here he is having a bowl of bouillabaisse and leaning forward when he talks to make sure his voice is heard on the recorder in a loud room. He looks a bit gruff, like someone who might show up at your door if you are late paying some money you owe to a very bad dude. He said, ‘I don’t know what you did, but it’s great.’ ”īuford, 65, has a voice that’s somewhere between gravelly and growly, and he speaks in bursts and pauses, often stopping midsentence, during which time his upper lip will turn inward and he’ll work it slightly before resuming. He wasn’t well and he’d lost his voice again. “When I finally finished the draft, which I thought was pretty good, he said, ‘It’s a good book.’ And I said, ‘Well Sonny, I’m going to do my revisions to make it a great book.’ He said, ‘It’s not a great book, it’s a good book.’ It delayed my finishing the book by a year. “His direction was more indirect,” Buford says. They’d known each other since the early 1980s, when Mehta was at Picador in London and Buford was running the literary journal Granta. Basically he’s serving a kind of editorial detention, and whatever the book looks like now, well, as he says, “It’s much edited since you last saw it.”īuford’s longtime editor was publishing legend Sonny Mehta, who died at the end of December. And, maybe, upon further reflection, a section he rewrote shouldn’t have been rewritten after all. It’s not Buford’s choice to be doing edits in the PRH office he made a lot of changes to first-pass pages.

Bill buford heat review