Brendan Dowling Author Archive
Email: bdowling@ala.org
“I Wanted A Whole Shakespearean Play Of A Human Body” – Samuel Ashworth On His Boisterous And Adventurous Debut Novel
The nontraditional placement of “death” and “life” in the title of The Death and Life of August Sweeney, Samuel Ashworth’s inventive and adventurous debut novel, is intentional. Readers first meet August Sweeney as a corpse on a medical examiner, about to be autopsied by the brilliant Dr. Maya Zhu for a select group of medical students. Ashworth’s novel is a result of immense craft and rigorous research, as he spent weeks observing autopsies at a hospital in Pittsburgh and received a grant to work as a prep cook in a Michelin-starred kitchen in France as part of research for the novel. Ashworth spoke about the novel’s unusual research process, his newfound evangelism for autopsies, and creating the Shakespearean character of August.
