36 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020

further reflection, a

section he rewrote

shouldn’t have

been rewritten

after all. Basically

he’s serving a kind

of editorial deten-

tion, and whatever

the book looks like now, well, as he says, “It’s much edited since

you last saw it.”

Buford’s longtime editor was publishing legend Sonny

Mehta, who died at the end of December. They’d known

each other since the early 1980s, when Mehta was at Picador

in London and Buford was running the literary journal

Granta.

“His direction was more indirect,” Buford says. “When I

Hell’s

Kitchen

Fourteen years after the bestselling

Heat, Bill Buford is back with another

culinary adventure

BY JONATHAN SEGURA

B

ill Buford is sorry, but he’s running late. This,

perhaps, isn’t surprising. He’s supposed to be at

lunch at a Midtown Manhattan bistro to discuss

his new book, Dirt (Knopf, May), which is also

behind schedule. In it, he chronicles his epic

freefall into French cuisine, and his family’s experience living

in Lyon for five years. There, Buford worked in a fancy restau-

rant’s very strict kitchen. And he was late to work. A lot. It was

a problem.

When he does arrive, he’s wearing a very New York ensemble

of dark on black on black on dark. His gray hair and beard are

cropped short, and he’s in a good mood. He’s coming from

Knopf’s offices down the street, where he’s been going over

second-pass pages.

It’s not Buford’s choice to be doing edits in the PRH office;

he made a lot of changes to first-pass pages. And, maybe, upon

© thomas schauer