Samuel Ashworth
LightNews LightNews
banner
samuelashworth.bsky.social
Samuel Ashworth
@samuelashworth.bsky.social
680 followers 210 following 1.5K posts
Author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY. NYT-bestselling ghostwriter and screenwriter. Guy at Barrelhouse, professor of Creative Writing at GWU. Swamp Dad. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-death-and-life-of-august-sweeney-samuel-ashworth/216
Posts Replies Media Videos
samuelashworth.bsky.social
every big 5 publisher said “we don’t know how to sell this book it’s gross” and Tom goddamn Colicchio read it and said “I know how” and here we are
A flyer for a dinner with a menu featuring: 1st Course Foie Gras Torchon 2nd Course Squash Agnolotti with Offal "Bolognese" 3rd Course Sweetbreads with Chinese Five Spice, Figs & Black Garlic Hoisin 4th Course Roasted Calf Liver with Onion Soubise, Charred Leeks & Honey Glazed Onions 5th Course Autumnal Dessert
November 6, 2025 at 1:58 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
fuck the beresford
a block by block electoral map of manhattan showing one pro-cuomo block in a sea of blue, right where a fancy-shmancy central park west building called the beresford is. jerry seinfeld lives there.
November 5, 2025 at 1:20 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
directement dans mes veines
"The remaining attendees at Cuomo’s watch party were instructed to move near the stage. The room is far from full."
November 5, 2025 at 3:46 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
You can shut one hundred percent of the fuck up, Bill
"Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, among the most impassioned (if not fearmongering) of the anti-Mamdani activists, on Tuesday offered Mamdani his help. “Congrats on the win,” he said on social media. “Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”
November 5, 2025 at 3:35 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
guys I don't think Sliwa's gonna pull it out
November 5, 2025 at 2:05 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
If you would like to read a novel that also says nice things about the kanafeh on Steinway avenue may I recommend THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY
August was a deep sleeper, but sometimes his eyes would flick open in the middle of the night and his mind would already be going at a hundred miles an hour. Back in Queens he’d get up and gone to the 24- hour diner down on Steinway Avenue to smoke cigarettes over coffee and home fries and watch the sun come up. There was also a Lebanese bakery that would open for him if he knocked on the window, and he would buy a kanafeh and eat it right there on the sidewalk and lick the sweet white cheese off his fingers
November 2, 2025 at 12:04 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
Imagine being an agent or editor and having the chance to help bring a Helen Dewitt book into the world, and not taking it because “it’s hard to follow.” You cowards. You fools.
Told by agents that the book was hard to follow, DeWitt’s response was to make it even more disorienting. She added a series of second-person narrators. She wove in a novel-within-a-novel by her fictional doppelgänger Rachel Zozanian, titled “Lotteryland,” which used chapters from one of DeWitt’s unfinished works, a satire about a country where everything is distributed by lottery. She made difficulties that she and Gridneff had writing the book, and their arguments about where it was going, part of the story.
October 30, 2025 at 12:12 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
If you'd asked my five years ago what my wildest dream for AUGUST was, it would not have said "Tom $%&@ing Colicchio is going to read it, love it, and host a dinner in its honor at his restaurant," because that's not a dream, that's delusion.

And now here we are.
www.instagram.com/reel/DQXSY5E...
A screenshot of an instagram page featuring chef Tom Colicchio holding up a copy of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY, announcing that he is hosting an offal-forward dinner in honor of the book
October 29, 2025 at 4:14 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I should probably post that this is real and actually happening shouldn't I resy.com/cities/new-y...
A flyer for a meal hosted by Tom Colicchio in honor of the novel The Death and Life of August Sweeney
October 21, 2025 at 7:10 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
Holy shit this makes Elizabeth Gilbert look calm and reasonable wapo.st/3J23pOs (gift link)
"The second cataclysm is slipped in almost casually more than halfway through the narrative, as if to minimize its impact. In the mayhem of Hamilton’s divorce, she asked her sister, Melissa — “the sole member of my family who will always ‘get’ me, who will consistently behave properly, righteously” — if she could visit her idyllic country home for a few days. The request was warmly granted. In the aftermath of this stay, Hamilton began an affair with Melissa’s husband of 23 years. Exactly why Jeffrey killed himself is an unanswerable question that Hamilton goes to exhaustive lengths to answer. Exactly why Hamilton chose to begin an affair with her sister’s husband is an answerable question that, unbelievably, she essentially skates right past. Where Hamilton is unflinching and vivid in her descriptions of the petty foibles and frailties of others, a privacy curtain descends when it comes to her own (worst) behavior."
October 16, 2025 at 8:15 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
Sure it’s great that the main human access point for information just makes shit up and presents it as fact
The author tried to Google “brazen cars,” a famous line from a Yeats poem, and Google’s AI spat out a complete fabrication reading “ The term "brazen cars" most likely refers to the "Brass Era" of automobile manufacturing, which was the period from roughly 1896 to 1915. It is not a type of car itself, but an industry term for the era when brass was used prominently for vehicle fittings.”
October 16, 2025 at 10:45 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
PSA to authors: every single email and DM offering to "boost exposure" for your book, no matter how specific or personal, no matter how altruistic they seem, is. A. Scam.

Goodreads listopia? A scam. Silent book club? A scam. Book spotlight? Scam scam scammity scam.
the author's inbox clogged with scam emails offering to help his book find its readers
October 15, 2025 at 3:24 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I'm getting 3-4 of these LLM-generated scam emails every week. Every author I know is. There's no hell too hot.
a garbage AI-generated letter offering to "unlock a wider audience" for the author's book featuring text that makes it seem like the "writer" has read the book but really they're just scamming another scam email offering to include the author's book in a "silent book club" which definitionally is NOT THE KIND OF THING THAT HAS ASSIGNED READING
October 15, 2025 at 3:14 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I am not emotionally ready to watch the Jane Goodall video but I can offer this, one of the more deranged choices I made in writing AUGUST SWEENEY, and the one I think I regret the least.
"He didn’t actually learn her name until the next morning, when he left her apartment. It just never came up. Her name was Jane Goodall. It really was. Being progressive, ethical parents, the Goodalls had named their daughter in a fit of admiration, hoping the name would inspire her on to punch through glass ceilings and travel the world. It never occurred to them that, while Jane was very proud of the name as a child—she even had a khaki uniform, and wore her hair in her namesake’s sensible ponytail—they’d drawn a big, shiny target on her back. The day she started middle school the gorillamating jokes began, and had more or less never stopped since then (the “Me Tarzans” began around college). When pointing out that Goodall studied chimps, idiot, turned out to be an ineffective comeback, she learned the art of sarcasm. She was tempted to change her name, but that would mean betraying Jane Goodall, to whom she could not bear to be disloyal. This was a lifelong trait of Jane’s: loyalty. So instead she crushed them academically, majored in anthro at Brown, and went (having added her middle initial, L, for Lily, to her resume) into television."
October 9, 2025 at 6:39 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I'm part of this lineup next Friday and what writer.org/event/perciv...
A screenshot of an event featuring Percival Everett, Madison Smartt Bell, and, somehow, the author
October 9, 2025 at 12:16 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I volunteer
A tweet from Rachel Lapides reading "when will they put a successful writer of literary fiction on dancing with the stars" A picture of the author some years ago, never mind how many, doing an awe-inspiring Russian split in the air
October 9, 2025 at 11:56 AM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
a meme: upper image is a screenshot of a gmail inbox with "report spam," which never works, next to a screenshot of the "stay signed in?" box from microsoft, which also never works. The caption reads "corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture. Lower image is Pam from the Office saying "they're the same picture."
October 8, 2025 at 3:13 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
But Dave it worked so well last time
screenshot of a FORTUNE article entitled "Mic's plans to become a millennial media powerhouse"
October 8, 2025 at 3:06 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
In the past three weeks I've started getting ten of these a goddamn day and maybe our overlords at google could devote 0.001% of their workforce to stopping the fucking firehose of scam emails we all have to deal with now
A screenshot of a gmail inbox featuring yet another spam email that looks real but begins with "Re:"
October 8, 2025 at 3:03 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
improbably I find myself in San Diego to teach a class and give a lecture and this place doesn’t feel real
An ad for a reading and lecture Just a holy shit sunset over the pacific A goblet of ceviche in tomato broth
October 2, 2025 at 4:31 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I’m gonna wind up teaching a whole modernism class next aren’t I
Text of a page from Edith wharton’s age of innocence
September 26, 2025 at 9:25 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
Time to show the kids some classic cinema
Four kids entranced by the flawless MIGHTY DUCKS
September 14, 2025 at 10:55 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
I'm googling addresses in Hamburg and I think I just found the title of my next trilogy
a google maps view of a jewelry store called SCHMUCKSAGA
September 5, 2025 at 12:41 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
September 23 if you’re in Philly come see me and @writesloud.bsky.social punch each other like police horses (on rosh hashanah no less)
A flyer for a “literary craft fight”
September 4, 2025 at 10:47 PM
samuelashworth.bsky.social
They keep remaking perfectly good movies when what they should actually be doing is remaking BAD movies that were good IDEAS which is to say I want like Aline Brosh McKenna or someone to remake ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN
the movie poster for ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN featuring a woman who is really more like 200 feet wrecking a freeway in a two-piece that defies all laws of fabric and physics
August 29, 2025 at 5:16 PM