An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results—from the bestselling author of Housemates.
With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.
For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet.
“Emma Copley Eisenberg truly gets life, putting details on the page like no one else—sexual identity and gender identity and fatness and thinness and love and heartbreak and family and Philadelphia—in her short story collection Fat Swim. I also underlined my favorite new term ‘my ex-best friend forever’ because oh, how I related. I loved these stories—funny and sad and deeply resonant.”—Marcy Dermansky, author of Hot Air and Hurricane Girl
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the bestselling author of the novel Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, as well as the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice and a finalist for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in such publications as Granta, Esquire, VQR, The New Republic, and The Cut, and she writes the popular Substack Frump Feelings. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.
View titles by Emma Copley Eisenberg
An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results—from the bestselling author of Housemates.
With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.
For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet.
Reviews
“Emma Copley Eisenberg truly gets life, putting details on the page like no one else—sexual identity and gender identity and fatness and thinness and love and heartbreak and family and Philadelphia—in her short story collection Fat Swim. I also underlined my favorite new term ‘my ex-best friend forever’ because oh, how I related. I loved these stories—funny and sad and deeply resonant.”—Marcy Dermansky, author of Hot Air and Hurricane Girl
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the bestselling author of the novel Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, as well as the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice and a finalist for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in such publications as Granta, Esquire, VQR, The New Republic, and The Cut, and she writes the popular Substack Frump Feelings. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.
View titles by Emma Copley Eisenberg
