Books

BOOKS

THE LUNATICS' BALL

award-winning essay collection
first runner-up for the Gournay Prize
accepted for publication in the 21st Century Essay series
Mad Creek Books (the literary trade imprint of The Ohio State University Press)
forthcoming 2027

Advance praise for The Lunatics' Ball:

"Let’s begin with a book that’s… not yet published. If you’re lucky enough to have talented author friends who trust you with their work in progress, you may get to read amazing books long before they’re available to the public. This was the case for me when I was given Jacqueline Doyle’s masterful book The Lunatics’ Ball. It’s a riveting memoir on her bipolar disorder—the discovery, the struggle, the acceptance—and a lyrical, sometimes speculative exploration of how women throughout history have dealt with their mental illness and how men and the medical establishment have mistreated them horribly. The book is also much more than that. I have every reason to believe that The Lunatics’ Ball will be published in 2026 or 2027, and when it does, you’ll hear about it from me again!"
Claire Polders, "2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids"

“In The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton), we share excerpts from Jacqueline Doyle’s project The Lunatics’ Ball, which is the title of her book-in progress, a hybrid memoiristic text that focuses on women who lived in psychiatric hospitals. Parts of the project also illuminate the history of psychiatric hospitals—formerly called “lunatic asylums”—in ways a publisher might categorize as “historical nonfiction.” When her own and her family’s history with mental illness needed space on the page, she added sentences constructed with strategies typically used in memoir. Soon, however, the project moved fluidly to include what the writer dreamt, personas she invented, and even included bits influenced by her characters’ (reported or author-imagined) interest in music, syntax, and lyricism. Doyle said, “It was a challenge…to write about the silenced, the hidden, the lost, and bring them alive on the page…” Her obsessions didn’t fit into any one narrative category, so she combined strategies from multiple genres and shaped them into something new. … What connects all of this isn’t resistance to genre. It’s loyalty to what’s urgent. We cross forms not to break rules, but because the material won’t come alive any other way. Hybrid writing, when it works, is the opposite of casual. It’s what happens when the writer follows a line of inquiry past the known forms into something more precise.”
Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante, “Hybrid Writing: Finding
the Right Container for the Story You Need to Tell,” Literary Hub

THE MISSING GIRL

award-winning flash fiction collection
winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press
one of "Our Favorite 2017 Small Press Short Story Collections (Plus a Few Others)" at Paper Darts
one of the "Best Books of 2017: Staff Picks" at The Coil
#9 Fiction Bestseller List (Sept.-Oct. 2017) at Small Press Distribution

isbn: 978-1-62557-983-6
Order from Black Lawrence Press HERE,
or from your local indie bookstore, or from Amazon HERE,

Praise for The Missing Girl

“In these dark and edgy stories, Jacqueline Doyle has made a dispassionate study of the degradation of girls and the twisted hearts of those who harm them. Most chilling is the ease with which these characters fall prey to violence and how quickly depravity finds its way past the surface of ordinary situations. Prepare to be very disturbed."
Elizabeth McKenzie, author of MacGregor Tells the World
and The Portable Veblen (2016 National Book
Award Finalist)

“Full of sex, lies, and vivid insights into the human compulsion to do the wrong thing, these stories go down easy but hit hard. A powerful and provocative collection."
Frances Lefkowitz, author of To Have Not

“Jacqueline Doyle knows where you live. The stories in her collection, The Missing Girl, have your address and even after the first read (and you will be back, she knows that), these stories will be moving in to stay. Whatever your usual role in a culture with an undeniable instinct for violence, Doyle's writing lures you to do more than dismiss it, more than abhor it, and yet this isn't a welcome to merely spectate, there is nothing gratuitous here unless life itself is gratuitous. In fact, Doyle has found the thread through that menace that surrounds us and is in us and is calling you in to hold onto your bit of it, to witness. Here, Doyle choreographs the everyday dance between safety and terror, between taking the chances we need to live and not living at all. The Missing Girl is a masterful work and a must read.”
Tupelo Hassman, author of girlchild

“Dark, haunting, relevant, cohesive, and incredibly well conceived. I absolutely loved The Missing Girl."
Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush and Wolf Centos

“Terror slips into the banal glimpses of everyday life—it creeps into the spaces not yet thought to be filled. … Flash form commands the ‘white space’ in this lyrical chapbook.”
Sarah Batcheller, review in
Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art

"These disturbing and powerfully-written stories together make a cohesive statement about the vulnerability of women in our society. I could not put this book down."
Jayne Martin, author of Suitable for Giving

"Well of course this is excellent. My only complaint is that I wanted more. Never mind, lucky readers. There are heaps of Jacqueline Doyle stories out in the world."
Kathy Fish, author of Rift and Together We Can Bury It

"This collection is mesmerizing and unforgettable! DAMN! GET A COPY!"
Meg Tuite, author of Meet My Haze and Bound By Blue

"Just read an advance copy of The Missing Girl and it's stunning inside and out. Get it when you can!"
James Tate Hill, author of Academy Gothic
and editor of Monkeybicycle

“Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition through Black Lawrence Press, The Missing Girl draws us into the seedy darkness of everyday life in small bursts of haunting prose as Doyle forces us to consider being both the hunter and the hunted. … Open a news site or even your Facebook feed, and there is a good chance you’ll see a headline mirroring these events. But it’s this close emotional proximity that makes the stories in The Missing Girl important, timely, and deserved of readers’ attention. … Doyle reminds us of the importance of listening to these stories—both hers and those echoing #MeToo around us.”
Katy Haas, review in New Pages

"Like 'Nola's' narrator, readers of The Missing Girl can expect to find themselves haunted by these stories for days after they set the chapbook down."
Wesley Cohen, review in The East Bay Review

"Doyle's genius is that through her flash fiction pieces, she relies on our societal knowledge to fill in the blanks of her finely drawn bits of terror."
Elizabeth DiPietro, review in Glassworks

"This book, dedicated to missing girls, shows the expansive power of condensed fiction. …The truth often hides in the spaces these eight short-short stories exclude. … These girls remain missing, but Doyle finds their stories. It’s twenty-eight pages you might read in one sitting, but will never forget."
Al Kratz, "Best Books of 2017," The Coil

"A haunting collection, its prose is clear and direct, with exquisite tension. … Doyle’s flash fiction answers the question how much can you leave out and still have a viable story? Each story is stripped to its skeleton, but it’s not just a pile of bones; rather there’s gristle and bits of jagged flesh. … Exceedingly timely in this #metoo revolution, The Missing Girl gives voice to eight women and girls who can’t—or can’t bring themselves to—tell their own stories. … The Missing Girl  truly puts the reader in the headspace of people on the razor’s edge of horror. It’s a great study on flash fiction as a form, as well as social commentary on women as prey in our society."
Lara Lillbridge, review in Mom Egg Review

"I read this chapbook recently and I’m still reeling. I was struck by how these stories poke around fearlessly in the darkest of corners. Each flash explores the world of the missing from different perspectives, from victim to onlooker to perpetrator. 'Nola,' originally published in Monkeybicycle, was a stand-out story for me."
   Emily Devane, interview with Tommy Dean

"This is a powerful collection, with razor sharp stories that linger."
  Emily Devane, review of The Missing Girl, Short Fiction in
Theory and Practice, vol. 8, nos. 1&2 (2018)

"Too often, violence against women is rendered as an act of nameless repetition. In beautiful yet economical prose, Doyle takes the haziness of 'nights like that, with boys like that' and imbues each scene and story with horrifying specificity. Women receive names, wills, bodies, and desires, even as Doyle charts their absence. The result is hard to read, perhaps, but harder to put down.
Zoë Ballering, “Naming Names: A Review of Jacqueline
Doyle’s The Missing Girl,” Bellingham Review (March 2019)

"You can read this chapbook of line-perfect flash in one breathless night, or you can read it over and over, as I have. … This collection challenges us to define what we mean by "missing": should we be concerned about literal disappearance or the ways girls lose huge chunks of themselves under violent misogyny?“
   Jan Stinchcomb, "Our Favorite 2017 Small Press Short Story
Collections (Plus a Few Others)," Paper Darts

"In the eight stories of The Missing Girl, victims and perpetrators drill in, slowly, slowly, until your equilibrium is off and you’ve been marked in a way you can’t quite explain. Read this chapbook in a gulp and find it hard to swallow after."
Chelsea Stickle, "Quarantine Reading with Chelsea Stickle,"
  Fractured Lit

SELECTED ANTHOLOGIES AND TEXTBOOKS

The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre, by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante (W.W. Norton)

The Past Ten: An Anthology, edited by Donald Quist, Kali White VanBaale, and Bailey Gaylin Moore (Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin)

Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness, edited by Diane Gottlieb (ELJ Editions)

Nothing Short Of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story, edited by Grant Faulkner, Lynn Mundell, and Beret Olsen (San Francisco: Outpost 19)

They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, edited by Simone Muench, Dean Rader, Sally Ashton, and Jackie K. White (New York: Black Lawrence Press,)

Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, edited by Josh MacIvor-Anderson (San Francisco: Outpost 19)

Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, edited by Robert Alexander, Eric Braun, and Debra Marquart (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, Marie Alexander Series)

BOOKS​

BOOKS