Great piece in The Observer on Bill Buford, one of my favorite writers. His book Among The Thugs is one of my favorite pieces of ’90s nonfiction, and his refounding of Granta built a home for some of the best ’80s writers. Buford went on to be the fiction editor of The New Yorker, and his new book is about what pulled him away from that gig.
The author of the Observer piece is Tim Adams, a former Buford deputy at Granta. He wrote one of the better essays in the recent The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, which featured some promising big-name writers (Binyavanga Wainaina, Franklin Foer, James Surowiecki, Jorge Castaneda, Nick Hornby, the obligatory Dave Eggers) but ended up being a bit disappointing. (And that’s beyond the grating condescension of the title.)