Bill Buford has had a storied and variegated career, a mix of high and low and sensitive and almost macho — a career that has twisted gently, like a flamed citrus peel destined for a Negroni.
He was born in Louisiana, grew up in California and lived for 18 years in England, where he was the editor of the literary magazine Granta. He wrote a venerated book about soccer hooliganism called “Among the Thugs.” For many years he was the fiction editor of The New Yorker.
In the aughts his attention turned, as did everyone’s in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” (2000), to food. In 2006, Buford published “Heat,” a very good book in which he fell under the Rabelaisian sway of Mario Batali and apprenticed with a butcher in Italy.
