Fat Swim

Fiction

De: 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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Eisenberg is attuned to every beautiful, terrible human thing: desire, shame, sensation, connection. Fat Swim is a lush, radical meditation on the body’s pleasure and potential. I know I’ll be returning to these stories again and again.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties

“Emma Copley Eisenberg has a spooky talent for inhabiting the minds of completely disparate people. I’d accuse Fat Swim of being an occult collection of stolen souls made to speak in a book, except that all the narrators are funny, wise, and heartbreaking, and know how to tell a quick gripping story—which is a sure sign that Eisenberg’s huge skill is ultimately responsible.”—Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby

“Some of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time—vivid, surprising, and pin-sharp . . . Emma Copley Eisenberg is a phenomenal talent—I could stack superlative after superlative here, and mean every single one. Buy this collection and thank me later.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love and White Cat, Black Dog

“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

“I love the way Emma Copley Eisenberg observes the world so precisely, attuned to unexpected—yet perfect—details. Fat Swim is lush with physical life and bodily sensation, vivid with textures and colors and temperature. Funny, mordant, and tender all at once—this is the rare book that exuberantly inhabits the human body, in all its grossness and glory.”—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans and Goodbye, Vitamin