Samuel Ashworth

2 months ago | therumpus.net | Samuel Ashworth

The Author: Sam AshworthThe Book: The Death and Life of August Sweeney (Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2025)The Elevator Pitch: The rise and fall of legendary Chef August Sweeney, told through his autopsy at the hands of a woman he mysteriously handpicked for the job. ***The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from? Sam Ashworth: In 2012 or so, I was a bartender in Boston. I was sitting in a sister bar with a coworker, and as you do, we started talking about dead bodies.

2 months ago | electricliterature.com | Samuel Ashworth

Reading Lists We’re inundated with chef content in film and television, but where are the novels?

Mar 20, 2025 | largeheartedboy.com | Samuel Ashworth

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Samuel Ashworth’s novelThe Death and Life of August Sweeney is a masterfully told debut.

Mar 20, 2025 | theatlantic.com | Samuel Ashworth

Maybe you were one of the 11.7 million people who watched when, on House M.D., the genius diagnostician Gregory House is roused in the middle of the night by a pounding at the door. A man he just gave a clean bill of health has collapsed and died. House and his colleague Eric Foreman decide to perform an autopsy themselves. Eager to see the man’s heart, House pushes Foreman to plunge a whirring saw into the patient’s sternum. They peer down: Blood seems to be trickling from the wound.

Feb 20, 2025 | washingtonpost.com | Samuel Ashworth

The strange thing about nearly all postapocalyptic fiction is how uninterested it is in dwelling on the apocalypse itself. Whatever killed the world has already happened. This isn’t a critique, really, so much as a consequence of the genre’s familiar comforts. It’s easy to dispense with one’s specific apocalypse (climate change, lately) in the space of a paragraph, and get down to the thing all postapocalyptic stories are really about: the meaning of sanctuary.