Emma Copley Eisenberg is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction 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. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Tin House, The Millay Colony and others, and her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, The Believer, Esquire, The New Republic, The Cut, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and others. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her next book of fiction, Fat Swim, will be published on April 28, 2026.
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FAT SWIM
An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House on April 28, 2026
“A lush, radical meditation on the body’s pleasure and potential.” —Carmen Machado
“Buy this collection and thank me later.”—Kelly Link
“Prepare to be shaken.”—Kiese Laymon
“Spiky, acerbic, and utterly addictive.”—Playboy
“I can’t stop thinking about these stories.” —Andrea Lawlor
“Funny, wise, and heartbreaking.”—Torrey Peters
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.
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Subscribe to Emma’s newsletter, Frump Feelings, for monthly dispatches on writing, books, body liberation, and Philly literary community.