{"id":44567,"date":"2025-08-04T12:38:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T12:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44567\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T12:38:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T12:38:12","slug":"a-taste-of-tuscany-seattle-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44567\/","title":{"rendered":"A Taste of Tuscany – Seattle magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up, author Kira Jane Buxton<\/a> had mixed feelings about her peripatetic childhood. Thanks to her father\u2019s job, her family hopped around the globe, spending time in Dubai, Jakarta, Singapore, Korea and Texas. It was an upbringing full of adventures \u2014 playing in dunes, exploring tropical jungles, making friends with the neighborhood animals \u2014 but at times, Buxton and her younger sister felt adrift.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Novelist Kira Jane Buston<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Kira Jane Buxton<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the \u201990s, all the stories I read, all the movies I watched, were about small-town communities that would band together and rise up against some injustice,\u201d says Buxton, the Thurber Prize finalist behind 2019\u2019s zombie apocalypse adventure Hollow Kingdom,<\/a> its sequel Feral Creatures <\/a>and the recently released novel Tartufo<\/a> (Grand Central Publishing). \u201cI was intrigued by that. Because we moved around a lot, my sister and I went up to my mom one day and said, \u2018We don\u2019t have any roots!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, Buxton\u2019s mother was editing a lifestyle magazine in Jakarta, and one of their contributors had recently written a story about living as an expat in Italy. \u201cShe had found roots in a tiny village in Tuscany,\u201d Buxton says. \u201cMy mom befriended her, we all went to Tuscany, and very unimaginatively fell in love with a house there.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve read Tartufo, you probably know where this story is going. Buxton\u2019s parents purchased the house \u2014 meeting an impeccably dressed woman in a fur coat on a desolate country road to hand over a sack of cash \u2014 and the family spent many summers in the small, medieval village sipping prosecco, eating local cuisine and fighting off the wild boars that came nightly to forage for vegetables in Buxton\u2019s father\u2019s garden. Seven years ago, a landslide damaged the house and almost killed Buxton\u2019s father, forcing him and his wife to move into their local village, where they remain to this day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat landslide inspired much of the book,\u201d Buxton says of Tartufo, which takes readers on a raucous romp through the Tuscan countryside as the dying fictional village of Lazzarini Boscarino makes a last ditch effort to save itself with a plan to auction off a recently discovered, record breaking truffle to the snobbish culinary elite. Infused with Buxton\u2019s trademark comedy \u2014 a geriatric donkey that nearly wins the mayoral election, a local buxom bartender who can only be described as a total force, laugh-out-loud misunderstandings and mishaps, and an apt range of metaphors from the poignant \u201cwet weekend of a man\u201d to a cat \u201cbest described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet brush\u201d\u2014 the book is a page-turning adventure through the type of Italian village that one hopes they stumble upon during a dreamy summer holiday.<\/p>\n

While Buxton\u2019s hallmark humor and careful attention to the animal kingdom are features of Tartufo, the novel is unmistakably a departure from her previous work. Rooted in present-day reality, it is an escapist tale that dives deep into human relationships, showing the power of connection and what can happen when a community, no matter how ragtag, bands together with a common goal. It\u2019s a heart-warming (and did I mention funny?) tale of resilience \u2014 the kind of story that inspired Buxton growing up. And also, there are truffles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a huge, unabashed truffle pig,\u201d Buxton says. \u201cI\u2019m always snuffling them out in any way I can. I find them so fascinating. It\u2019s a smelly, hideous, subterranean fungus that is really nature\u2019s rags-to riches story. It\u2019s pulled from the dirt, then goes on this byzantine journey: sometimes it\u2019s flown all the way to the other side of the world and put on a beautiful plate of pasta in a Michelin-starred restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The prized truffle at the heart of Buxton\u2019s new novel<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Kira <\/p>\n

The author has some experience with truffle hunting (a major plot point in the book, and a process that Buxton describes with gorgeously melodic language), having gone on several tours both in the Northwest and Italy, an experience she highly recommends. But it\u2019s not just the pasta-enhancing goodness that attracted Buxton to the fungus. A larger idea is at stake. \u201cThere is an allegory in the truffle,\u201d she says. \u201cIt lives in symbiosis with the tree. It\u2019s not just ecology, but it suggests a social structure where we are more powerful when we are connected to community.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Growing up, author Kira Jane Buxton had mixed feelings about her peripatetic childhood. Thanks to her father\u2019s job,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-44567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}