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Stories
by Emily Doyle
"A magnificent debut" (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of being a woman.
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.
"Arresting...The stories are often bleak yet funny, using elements from science fiction and fantasy to highlight the difficulties characters have with communication...This surprising, genre-bending collection will appeal to lovers of grim humor and stories that feature characters learning to break out of constricting public and private roles." —Library Journal (starred review)
"The 11 stories in Emily Doyle's bracing debut collection, Please Don't Touch the Body, vibrate with undercurrents of guilty desire, delicious rage, and the bewildering mysteries of the underworld...Motherhood and its discontents loom large in this mesmerizing debut story collection combining high drama with supernatural mystery and characters spanning a diverse demographic range." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Readers will find much to love in these dynamic and heartfelt stories." —Publishers Weekly
"Doyle's evocative collection...showcases ghosts in all forms...Doyle's debut embraces the strange and even stranger...Perfect for readers who appreciate oddities and dark humor with a dash of [science fiction]." —Booklist
"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!
This information about Please Don't Touch the Body was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emily Doyle has an MFA from UC Riverside. She has received awards including the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Participant Scholarship and the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and her work has appeared in The Sun, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
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