Key editor exits New Yorker
Buford inks three-book deal with Knopf
|
Buford, also the author of "Among the Thugs," is said to have inked a three-book deal with Knopf to publish "Heat," a co-authored title with chef Mario Batali; a New York chronicle called "Spying on My Neighbors"; and a book about his father, a nuclear physicist in Los Angeles in the '50s.
"Bill Buford has been one of the great fiction editors in the history of the magazine, bringing into our pages countless new voices," said editor in chief David Remnick.
"He has an intelligence and an imagination that has made itself known in the magazine all the time, and I know he will do that, too, as a writer."
The mag hasn't named Buford's successor.
The former editor of the Cambridge lit mag Granta will remain in his role until the end of the year, when the Conde Nast mag publishes its fiction issue. He'll then take a few months of leave to finish his book with Batali. A year from now he'll be the New Yorker's European correspondent.
In 1994, then-New Yorker editor in chief Tina Brown tapped Buford, an American expatriate living in London whom the newspapers occasionally referred to as "Wild Bill."
Buford was largely responsible for the turnaround of Granta, once a floundering British lit mag that under his leadership gave early exposure to the likes of Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
In his eight-year tenure at the New Yorker, Buford published a young internationalist cross-section of writers including Juno Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith and Aleksandar Hemon, as well as then-upcoming American scribes such as Dave Eggers and E. Annie Proulx.
