Please Don't Touch the Body - by Emily Doyle (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"A magnificent debut" (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of being a woman.

"In these carefully crafted stories, lonely people come face to face with the strange or the unsettling, leading to messy, horny, funny, and ultimately profound complications." -Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel and The Other Americans

The 11 stories in Please Don't Touch the Body are at once dry and comic, grounded and surreal as they play deftly with genre and expectation to explore human alienation.

In the collection's first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades, while in the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in "Thank You No Thank You" a young woman who grew up in a cloistered religious community and escaped to a liberal law school grapples with the rules she learned in childhood, the rules of her new life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.

Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and voice and a writer to watch.

Review Quotes

"Doyle is a knockout writer." --Debutiful, "Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2026"

"A magnificent debut. In these carefully crafted stories, lonely people come face to face with the strange or the unsettling, leading to messy, horny, funny, and ultimately profound complications. Emily Doyle is a rising star." --Laila Lalami, Pulitzer-Prize finalist and bestselling author of THE DREAM HOTEL

"Open-heartedly honest, fiercely intelligent, and wonderfully fresh . . . Please Don't Touch the Body not only surprises and delights, it sings." --Jessie Ren Marshall, author of WOMEN! IN! PERIL!

"What strange, beautiful, and deftly written stories. Here are women suffocating in their passivity, teetering between the lives that had been forced upon them and the lives they've yet to choose. Doyle is a writer to watch." --Rita Chang-Eppig, author of DEEP AS THE SKY, RED AS THE SEA

"Please Don't Touch the Body drew me in with the glitter of a curious idea or question and its big-heartedness kept me reading. Emily Doyle offers up a thoughtful collection that studies the secret, hungry spaces within our loud human lives." --Ramona Ausubel, author of THE LAST ANIMAL and A GUIDE TO BEING BORN

"The stories of Please Don't Touch the Body are stunning-wonderfully dry yet musical, with potent characterizations and sad humor." --Charmaine Craig, National Book Award Longlisted author of MISS BURMA

"Please Don't Touch the Body is heartbreaking and hopeful, with prose that is spare when necessary and bountiful elsewhere." --Josh Emmons, author of THE LOSS OF LEON MEED

"An electrifying debut that thrums with dark humor, desire, and the uncanny ache of being alive. These effervescent stories are sharp as a scalpel and tender as a bruise. With prose that dazzles and disarms, Emily Doyle renders alienation and longing with both wit and grace, inviting us to experience the body - its hungers, its betrayals, its beauty - in all its unruly splendor." --Alex Espinoza, author of THE SONS OF EL REY

About the Author