Samuel Ashworth‘s writing has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, Longreads, Eater, Hazlitt, Gawker, and the Rumpus. He published his debut novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney, in March 2025. In it, an autopsy gives readers a glimpse into a legendary chef’s flavorful career.
We asked Ashworth to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire to give readers insight into the books that shaped the writer throughout his life and the titles that influenced his debut book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I can map out my development as a child through my ability to understand the jokes in Calvin & Hobbes. I started reading them when I was six or seven, and I wore those books down to the spine. There was so much in them I didn’t get, but there was something enchanting in that opacity. Watterson wrote for kids in a way that was so respectful of their intelligence. He never pandered or talked down. I still remember the shiver of pleasure I felt at 13 when all three pieces of the punchline “You mean mainstream commercial nihilism can’t be trusted?” fully clicked together for me. That line was my real bar mitzvah, I don’t know how else to put it.
What book helped you through puberty?
One of the weirdest things about promoting a debut book is that when you do interviews about writing it, you’re actually being asked to talk about something that you did years ago and moreover, you have to talk about it like you weren’t in a demented haze the whole time, surrounded by desk debris and emotional support cups.
I say this because trying to remember puberty feels the same way. I actually think that ages 12-13 were sort of a literary desert in my life, because I had acquired a Playstation 2. Then when I turned 14 we did Macbeth in English class, and when the teacher (and I) found out that I could read all of it fluently, without stumbling, he had me play Macbeth the entire semester. No one else got a shot. And if there’s one thing that gets any of us through puberty and adolescence, it’s discovering we have a talent. That was the first time I really understood that I was straight-up better at something than other people, and when you’re 14, that’s a hell of a drug.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I’ll give you three:
Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer: it’s the best, most luminous contemporary style guide, and it makes learning grammar and usage feel bracing, instead of dull.
Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory: I could have put the Odyssey here, but all these kids are up to their necks in romantasy anyhow; they might as well know where it came from. Plus, of all the ancient (I’m counting the 15th century as ancient here) epics, the Morte d’Arthur is the most unabashedly fun. It’s goofy, campy, and goes a million miles an hour. Plus, there’s enough that’s fucked up about the story (much like the Odyssey) that students can point out all the fucked-up things. It’s incredibly important that kids get to be critics of the books they’re assigned, not just appreciators or comprehenders. Presenting books as flawless classics, the zeniths of human achievement, is a terrible way to teach. If something’s fucked up in a story, they should get to talk about why it’s fucked up! That’s how you become a human being!
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach: I think Mary Roach’s books should be assigned in every biology class, but especially this one—for many reasons, but none so much as the power of letting kids see grownups be as curious about sex as they are, and engage with it honestly and hilariously. Honorable mention goes to Rachel Gross’s brilliant Vagina Obscura.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Since teaching one’s own work is frowned on, I’m going with Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, Fran Ross’s Oreo, Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the columns of E.B. White, Ellison’s Invisible Man, all of Angels in America, and the shooting script for Bull Durham.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The biggest problem with writing (and marketing) August Sweeney is that there wasn’t anything out there that resembled it. The closest thing is Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which follows a London neurosurgeon over the course of a single day. To write it, McEwan spent years shadowing brain surgeons, to the point where, when a pair of medical students mistook him for a doctor and asked him to describe what was happening in a surgery they were all observing, he was able to convincingly impersonate one. When I heard about that I figured I had to do the same to write Maya Zhu, my pathologist. Hers is also a one-day story (while August’s covers 50 years, and the narratives interlace), and to write it, I had to go do a stint in an autopsy lab. After that the most helpful book I had was Autopsy Pathology Vol. 2.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It was his debut novel in 1952, and he was almost my age when it came out. The language is so shamelessly pyrotechnic, so look-Ma-no-hands, so utterly self-announcing, that it feels like the kind of writing that can only happen in a debut. This Jewish guy from Brooklyn set out to write an American Morte d’Arthur with a hand-hewn bat in place of Excalibur. It’s huge, messy, rangy, ridiculous, sexy—a hell of a book.
I just finished Mary Rodgers’ (daughter of Richard) Shy, which is just straightforwardly the dishiest, smartest, most omnidirectionally lacerating memoir I’ve ever read. Mary dimes on everyone; her coauthor, Jesse Green, writes that her main critiques of his writing were: “Make it funnier. Make it meaner.” It’s everything you dream a Broadway memoir might be.
I’m also plowing through some fellow debuts, like Jon Hickey’s Big Chief, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes, and Daria Lavelle’s Aftertaste!