The Death and Life of August Sweeney - Samuel Ashworth
Product Details:
Paperback : 318 Pages
ISBN : 9781951631413
Cover design: Benjamin Shaykin
About the Book:
Legendary chef August Sweeney has served his final meal, dying in the middle of service in the very restaurant he built to secure his legacy.
When Dr. Maya Zhu, a guarded, intense autopsist, is summoned to investigate, she discovers she must operate under strict conditions Sweeney himself dictated before he died. As she digs deeper into his immense body, everything that can go wrong, does, because August Sweeney isn't about to let a little thing like death stop him from raising hell.
The Death and Life of August Sweeney finds two people drawn together across the barrier of death. In her ruthless drive to excel as a doctor, Zhu has walled herself off from almost everything. As she dissects Sweeney, teasing out the mysteries hidden in his body, she begins to understand that she is doing an autopsy on her counterpoint: an equally ruthless artist who made excess his muse. As she obsesses over what happened to Sweeney under the strangest conditions of her career, her life– and August’ s death– will never be the same.
About the Author:
Samuel Ashworth has been a bartender, a dancer, and a reporter. He has gutted seafood in the back of Michelin-starred restaurants and assisted with autopsies in a Pittsburgh hospital. His fiction and nonfiction appear in the Washington Post Magazine, Longreads, Eater, Hazlitt, Gawker, the Rumpus, and so on. He is a professor of creative writing at George Washington University, and assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. A native New Yorker, he now lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, DC. He is on Twitter and Bluesky at @samuelashworth.
“This is a generous book. A sumptuous and delightful feast of observation into the literal, physical human heart, as well as the metaphorical one. Ashworth has a talent for creating characters so detailed and aIive that they are practically three-dimensional. Flawless.”
“The Death and Life of August Sweeney is one of the most sumptuous and inventive novels I’ve read in years. In language that sings with seductive detail, Ashworth twines the stories of a magnetic celebrity chef with the obsessive doctor assigned to his autopsy. Not since Jim Crace’s Being Dead has death contained all the drama and intrigue of life. I flew through this novel but the aftertaste—of pleasure and passion and longing—lingers still.”
“The Death and Life of August Sweeney is a (literally) visceral tale of loves familial and romantic, sins of the spirit and flesh, redemptions little and big. In carving out a fictional space within the celebrity chef world for August Sweeney, Sam Ashworth charts decades of our culture’s shifting relationship to food with deft humor and memorable characters. This is the most fun I’ve had reading about an autopsy since Mary Roach’s STIFF.”
“An enchanting, captivating narrative, with extraordinary characters at its core. In unerring detail and confident prose, Ashworth immerses readers in a rich tapestry of events. A masterful debut.”
“Visceral in every sense of the word. In Ashworth’s assured and exacting prose, what could so easily be disturbing becomes decadent. Divine, even. A triumph.”
“With prose as sharp as a scalpel and rich as haute cuisine, Samuel Ashworth brings his characters to life (and death), along with their passions, idiosyncrasies, and grudges. This impressive debut is a New York story at its best, brimming with visceral detail, smarts and humor.”
“Hilarious, accurate, and all too familiar. I love it!”