The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Jennifer Wilson writes about culture for the New Yorker, culture in many forms, everything from the latest in literary fiction to the

boom in pre-up agreements. Jen sat down the other day for a conversation with the author of a new

book called Fat Swim. I first met Emma Copley-Eisenberg around seven years ago in Philadelphia,

where we both lived at the time.

She had created a literary organization called Blue Stoop to help connect the city's community of

writers. Now she's out with Fat Swim, a short story collection set in Philadelphia.

The characters are vibrant and many identify as fat and are resentful that

they live in a world that wants to, you know, limit their cravings for food, for one another,

and for life. Emma is one of the foremost thinkers about fat phobia in literature,

but also in American culture more broadly. And it was one of the reasons why I was just very

excited to have the opportunity to talk to her. Here's Jennifer Wilson talking with Emma Copley

Eisenberg. So the book is called Fat Swim.

It's a collection of short stories, and the first story is also called Fat Swim.

And it begins with an eight-year-old girl named Alice looking out her window.

Yeah, that story was sort of the first time I was like, okay, I think I'm writing a

collection of stories that has like a real coherent. I would call it a plot through line through the

stories. And she sees this group of fat women who live in her neighborhood. She lives in West Valley

and has some sort of complicated feelings where she's sort of identifying with them and sort of aroused by them

and sort of wants to be a part of their group but also feels foreign because she's a kid and they're

adults. So yeah, there's this moment I think where Alice sees just like some long leg hair on one of the

...