Bill Buford Boeken

An issue of Granta devoted to all things Soviet, including fiction, non-fiction, photographs, interviews and an exclusive interview with Mikhail Gorbachev by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Part diary and part reportage, The Soccer War is a remarkable chronicle of war in the late twentieth century. Between 1958 and 1980, working primarily for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, with characteristic cogency and emotional immediacy, he recounts the stories behind his official press dispatches—searing firsthand accounts of the frightening, grotesque, and comically absurd aspects of life during war. The Soccer War is a singular work of journalism.

Why do biographies remain so popular? Granta 41 presents a special collection of biographies organized around a single idea - how do you tell the story of a life'. Also in this issue is the exclusive first publication of Saul Bellow's Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son, James Atlas on Bellow's apprenticeship in Chicago, Andrew Motion on the discovery of Philip Larkin's secret Northumberland hideaway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the mysterious Frau Frida whom he first met in Vienna after the war, plus Richard Holmes, Ian Hamilton, Louise Eldrich, Lorna Sage, and Luc Sante amid the police archives of 1914 New York.

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.

“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

The second instalment of Granta magazine's list of young British writers featuring a wide array of new voices, from Alan Hollinghurst to A.L. Kennedy.

Bill Buford, an enthusiastic, if rather chaotic, home cook, was asked by the New Yorker to write a profile of Mario Batali, a Falstaffian figure of voracious appetites who runs one of New York's most successful three-star restaurants. Buford accepted the commission, on the condition Batali allow him to work in his kitchen, as his slave.

Granta 43 celebrates a new generation of twenty of the best new British writers. Selected by Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, John Mitchinson and Bill Buford.

'A chomping, romping, savoury tour de force: by turns hilarious, and seriously thought provoking' Simon SchamaFor most of his adult life, Bill Buford had secretly wanted to find himself in France, in a French kitchen, having mastered the art of French haute cuisine.