Tuesday, July 14, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **“A magnificent debut” (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of womanhood.** 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). **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. **Claire Jia’s** debut novel Wanting was an NPR, Elle, Public Books and Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, The Rumpus, Reductress, and more. She writes for television and co-wrote the Peabody Award-winning interactive series We Are OFK. She hails from the suburbs of Chicago, but today she lives in Los Angeles with her friends.