Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT May 13, 2026
The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed
Join us this spring for a conversation with Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of the bestselling novel Housemates, about her new short-story collection, Fat Swim at The Center for Fiction.
A collection of loosely linked stories examining bodies and queerness in the city of Philadelphia, Fat Swim traverses violence and desire in a world full of looking and watching. Eisenberg explores these themes with a bold, incisive style, confronting the often “fatphobic hellscape of fiction” (Electric Literature) with characters that are intensely human.
At the event, Eisenberg will join novelist and journalist Tembe Denton-Hurst (Homebodies) in exploring how readers and writers can look unflinchingly at the human body in all its shapes and sexualities, and discuss the process of creating richly connected short stories.
We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs. Please note that tickets do not include books; we encourage you to order in advance online or purchase copies at the event.
Featuring
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Emma Copley Eisenberg
Emma Copley Eisenberg
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. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared widely including in the Yale Review, Granta, the Paris Review, the New Republic, the Cut, TIME, the New York Times Review of Books, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts, and is a 2026 Pew Foundation fellow. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Tin House and others, and has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, Temple University and independently. Her next book of fiction, Fat Swim, which includes the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, will be published by Random House on April 28, 2026.
Photo Credit: Kenzi Crash
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Tembe Denton-Hurst
Tembe Denton-Hurst
Tembe Denton-Hurst (known on the internets as @tembae) is a writer at New York Magazine and the author of the novel Homebodies, which the NYT Book Review called a “sharp, charming, and passionate debut.” She also writes the bestselling newsletter, Extracurricular, where she writes about books and the culture surrounding it. When she’s not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens where she lives with her wife and their two cats Stella and Dakota.
Featured Book
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Fat Swim
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Published by Random House Publishing Group
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.
