By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body are thrillingly concerned with the devastation-and power-of being alive today.
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. 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 grapples with the rules she learned in her religious childhood, the freedoms of her new and more liberal life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.
Emily Doyle is the author of the debut collection Please Don’t Touch the Body and her forthcoming debut novel, Encounter. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the Sun, and elsewhere, and she has received numerous awards, including the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participant Scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside.
Read: “Copernicus Is Dying”, Literary Hub
First lines: It seems impossible, but the lanky Petco cashier with the shiny blond pompadour insists that he’s telling the truth.
“A shortage?” I ask.
He nods.
“All of them?” He nods again.