Please Don't Touch the Body
Stories
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A magnificent debut" (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of womanhood.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Debutiful, Lit Hub, Chicago Review of Books, and Autostraddle
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.
Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and "a writer to watch" (Rita Chang-Eppig).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Surprises abound in Doyle's strange and sublime debut collection. In the funny "Ronald Reagan Is Reborn as a Puppy," the dead president is reincarnated as an adolescent girl's new dog. Narrating, he prizes his virility and declares he's "un-neuterable"—"Carter and Mondale and Gorbachev knew it. Nancy knew it best of all. To neuter me, I can only assume, would be to end me." The hypochondriac narrator of "Thank You No Thank You," who is almost done with law school, agonizes over her certainty that she has stomach cancer and will die of it before graduation. In the title story, a young woman takes a job cooking and helping a retiree around the house, only to discover her real job is to help him summon the ghost of his dead lover, who begins to haunt her during her own time. Some entries start strong and fizzle out, like "The Diver," about a woman who works on underwater documentaries, but when Doyle is at her best, she brings her eccentric characters' humanity into poignant relief, as in "New Mercies," about an aging woman with dementia who believes she and her wife have cloned themselves into babies who will preserve the women's memories. Readers will find much to love in these dynamic and heartfelt stories.
