Book Event: Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Thrilled to welcome back Emma Copley Eisenberg for an off-site event at Haymarket House (800 W Buena Ave) to celebrate the release of Fat Swim! For this event, Emma will be joined in conversation by Rebecca Makkai.

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.
“These interconnected stories blitzed my brain and gut. Prepare to be shaken.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026: Playboy, Literary Hub, Debutiful, LGBTQ Reads, Electric Lit, SheReads/The Stacks, Publishers Lunch
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 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.

Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and it was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at Haymarket House (800 W Buena) which is a wheelchair accessible space. The wheelchair ramp is located via the private parking lot, which is accessible via N. Clarendon Avenue. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected]. We have a limited amount of free scholarship tickets for this event. To receive one, please email [email protected].

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