Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which will be published on April 28, 2026 by Hogarth. You can pre-order your copy here.
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.
Here is the cover, designed by Elena Giavaldi:
Emma Copley Eisenberg: I’m absolutely in love with this cover. The large yellow inflatables are joyful but also a little unsettling, suggesting the ways that what is inside our bodies is always straining to get out and could pop at any moment. Pools and water are a strong presence in this book, offering buoyancy and respite but also the threat of exposure and drowning. It’s a layered cover that offers both brightness and despair, possibility and constriction, which feels very right for the characters in Fat Swim.
Elena Giavaldi: When I started working on the cover for this collection of stories, I first gathered input from the author, who had a strong vision. She imagined a bright yellow, or possibly a yellow-and-blue combination for the cover.
I knew the design needed to feel bold and a little edgy, just like the stories themselves, so I explored both typographic and photographic directions. In the end, we went with a typographic approach, using a painting by Lynne Jones for the background—the texture of painted water felt more dynamic and visually engaging than a photo.
To contrast the painterly texture, I used a bold, inflatable-style font for the title, paired with handwritten type to bring in a more personal, human touch. This was a fun and challenging project, and it was really rewarding to find the right visuals that brought the author’s vision to life.