Samuel Ashworth

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY, from @SFWP in 2025. NYT-bestselling ghostwriter. Guy @barrelhouse, prof @ GWU. Rep: @AevitasCreative & CAA. Swamp Dad.

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Articles

The First Book: Sam Ashworth

1 month 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.
The 7 Greatest Cooks in Literature

2 months ago | electricliterature.com | Samuel Ashworth

Reading Lists We’re inundated with chef content in film and television, but where are the novels?
Samuel Ashworth’s music playlist for his novel The Death and Life of August Sweeney

2 months ago | 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.
Everything TV Taught You About Autopsies Is Wrong

2 months ago | 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.
Review | A sci-fi novel that feels like listening to a Hans Zimmer score

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.
We’re in the Midst of a Cocktail Tasting Menu Mini Boom

Feb 13, 2025 | punchdrink.com | Samuel Ashworth

My wife swears that the greatest cocktail in the world is a cold Martini on an empty stomach. It’s not the taste she loves so much as the whole experience. The opalescent frost on the glass, the chilly slug of booze right to the gut, the shiver of hedonism. Ever since Jerry Thomas began unfurling ribbons of fire to make Blue Blazers in the 1860s, that experience has been at the heart of cocktail culture.
How Peter Chang’s Legendary Restaurants Handle the Christmas Rush

Dec 11, 2024 | eater.com | Samuel Ashworth

The first and maybe only time I’ve ever truly felt the Christmas spirit was in my second hour of standing outside a restaurant called Q by Peter Chang in Bethesda, Maryland. It was December 25, 2021. I had been prudent, I thought, calling in the order at five, and arriving just after six.
They Made a “Sports Bar for Politics.” It Went About How You’d Expect.

Oct 1, 2024 | punchdrink.com | Samuel Ashworth

Over the last two weeks, a new bar in Washington, D.C., has been speedrunning the online outrage cycle at a breathless pace. Political Pattie’s, located on 9th and U streets, opened on September 20 with the stated goal of “putting the ‘lit’ back in politics.” Within one week, it had been the subject of an avalanche of derision on social media, become an “anti-woke” icon in the eyes of the Daily Mail and The Spectator, and earned segments on D.C.’s local NPR and Fox affiliates.
Review | ‘The Modern Fairies’ is a raucous work of historical fiction

Jul 23, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Samuel Ashworth

(Avid Reader)Review by Samuel AshworthJuly 24, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDTIt is the late 17th century, and King Louis XIV is at the pinnacle of his power. Versailles is the hub of the French aristocracy, a great beehive dripping with honey — and bristling with stingers. We are in the era of the great salons, the private gatherings where nobles and intellectuals converged to hon-hon the issues of the day.