Please Don't Touch the Body

About this book

"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).