Due Date with Johanna Hedva
where we ask our favourite WRITERS to fill in a Library Card with the books they have on loan, reserved, lost & found and on their top shelf.
Introducing our new monthly column DUE DATE. Inspired by library sections and driven by the curiosity to get to know the books behind our favourite writers, tune in every month as we reveal what titles fill their bookshelves. What they’re currently reading, what they’re going to read next, what vintage classic they can’t get out of their heads and what book is their favourite of all time. Find out on DUE DATE.
First up is Johanna Hedva.
ON LOAn: What are you currently reading?
I buy books almost every day and read a lot at the same time. I just love holding them in my hands. I just got to the last page of Traces of Enayat, which I started during a residency in Italy in April, and it's one of my absolute favorites of recent years. Many of these have floated in as recommendations from friends. I got New Skin last week at the book launch in LA and I was already twenty pages in while just sitting in the crowd. The friend who took me to the launch recommended The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy and I am now a Mary McCarthy FAN. Thank you to David Naimon for writing to me personally to recommend Hardly Creatures and The Wax Child, which I am loving. Deborah Levy is I think my favorite living writer; as usual, I am inhaling her new one.
RESERVED: WHAT ARE YOU excited to read next?
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is something like a deity for me, an artist I am, in my own work and way, kind of building a lifelong altar to. This is her first museum monograph and I put it on my desk and stare at the cover every day. I will open it soon. In the summer, I read biographies; they’re my equivalent of a beach read. I drink the gossip, the interior design details, the journal entries dishing about enemies and lovers. I’ve been excited to read the Andrew Durbin since I first read the acquisition announcement years ago. And Ruins, Child, from what I’ve heard, is giving soon to be a new obsession.
LOST & FOUND: WHAT IS A classic YOU loved reading or HAVE recently rediscovered?
Cleopatra's Nose by Judith Thurman is one of the most formative books for me—I read it when it came out in 2007, dipped in for rereads of certain pieces for years, bought it for countless friends, and just reread it all the way through for probably the fourth time this spring. Why everyone is not talking about Judith Thurman is beyond me. She is everything.
TOP SHELF: What’s your favourite book ever?
I got to write the introduction to the reissue of Fuck Journal last year. It was the highlight of my career.
