Continuing JOUISSANCE’s new series, where writers, creatives and muses in our circle unveil their curated personal library – an idea inspired by our forever literary muse Anaïs Nin’s letters and the secret confessions she exchanged with fellow writer and lover Henry Miller.

We begin by checking in with collaborators from our ongoing erotic short story series, The Collector. This week, Emily Wells, author of 'House of the Sleeping Beauty', talks us through her treasured summer reads, dream sun-kissed spots and most evocative scent. Just in time for your holidays, whether home or away…

This year, two favourites have been brilliant translations from the French originals by Emma Ramadan: Anne Garréta’s Sphynx, an Oulipian novel written without any gender markers to refer to the protagonist or the love interest, and Barbara Molinard’s Panics, a collection of stories saved by Duras (Molinard would destroy nearly everything she wrote).

I loved K. Patrick's Mrs. S, the best novel about longing I've read in ages, and I always return to Gavin Lambert's The Goodby People and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse – these really compliment summer languishing.

My two reading spots are emblematic of the dichotomy that is Los Angeles. If it's temperate: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the shade, by the swans. When it's too hot to be outside: the rotating bar at the brutalist Bonaventure Hotel downtown. It's a completely bewildering space, and I always leave with a revised position on whether the building is a condemnation or celebration of capitalist consumerism (read Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis on the building!).

When it's hot, I love wearing EN PLEIN AIR. I'm not normally crazy about citrus, but this one really compliments the jasmine and orange blossom you encounter walking around in the summer.