Emily Doyle, who received her MFA from UC Riverside, is the Los Angeles-based author of the short story collection, “Please Don’t Touch the Body.”
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
On its surface, “Please Don’t Touch the Body” is a book of short stories concerning what’s wonderful and horrifying about being a woman. But the secret way I think about this book is that it’s for the sickos who understand that womanhood is like starring in a movie that’s flickering unpredictably between romance and horror. You fall in love with someone. You fall in love with yourself. You appreciate your body. You hate your body. Your body appreciates you back, and then it betrays you. The world holds you up as an ideal, and then it tries to destroy you. And all of this is as terrifying as it is beautiful, and it never ends.
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
Q. What’s the most memorable question or comment you’ve gotten at a book event?
At my book launch, my dear friend Corey Spanner asked, “If someone encountered your book while stranded on a desert island, what’s the one thing you would want them to know before they read the first page?” A philosophically dense question that brought to mind the slightly silly image of Tom Hanks crawling toward the volleyball in “Cast Away.”
My answer was that I would want them to know that “Please Don’t Touch the Body” is meant to make them feel less alone, even while stranded on a desert island.
Q. Is there a book or type of book you’re reluctant to read?
One of the absolute best things about being a writer is that you befriend other writers, and you fall for them as people. Then you read their work, and you realize you’re into so many more genres than you expected.
So it’s not that I’m reluctant to read anything; it’s that through my friends, I’ve realized I have a near-bottomless desire for variety. For example, Chloe Lauter’s visceral “The Flayed Man” and Zefyr Lisowski’s revelatory “Uncanny Valley Girls” revealed I need more horror, and writing about horror, in my life. Claire Jia’s brilliant “Wanting” further increased my interest in books set in China. And Amanda Rizkalla’s beautiful and heartbreaking debut “Hungered” prompted me to search for more adult novels centering the very young.
22 new books coming in October 2026 to add to your reading list
Q. Is there a book that tapped into an emotion you didn’t expect?
Stay with me here, because I’ll get to the point eventually: I don’t like zombies. Actually, I hate zombies. The idea of a corpse walking around and eating people disgusts me on a visceral, instinctual level and fills me with existential dread. Now, you might think, Emily, that’s the point of zombies. But I promise that while zombies might strike you with fear, they overwhelm me with panic. When I was a child, I was plagued (hah) by nightmares about zombie apocalypses, and I would wake up from them nauseated and soaked in cold sweat. So when I started to read Anne de Marcken’s zombie novel, “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over,” I braced myself for my typical zombie-related bad feelings.
Rather than filling me with disgust, though, Marcken’s zombies knocked me off my axis and rendered me vulnerable to the hope and tenderness and aching sense of beauty at the center of her story. Also, her writing made me laugh. Hard. This book was, to me, a joyful surprise.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season” made me sick—sick with jealousy over the controlled prose and intricately layered plot, yes. But also sick with the depiction of people living in a world already wrecked by climate crises, with no ready way out of disaster and still pressing forward. I didn’t like what this book suggested about what might come for my own world—and I pray that as a species we manage to choose a better path. Still, I needed to hear its message, a message that speaks simultaneously to humanity’s potential for ugliness and glory.
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
Who hurt you? Just kidding. What I’d really like to ask is this: has my book made you feel a little more connected to yourself and the world?
Because this is my hope.
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026