Matt Borondy, Publisher: I have finally triumphed over Franzen's Freedom and am moving on to the new Dan Chaon and some other stuff TBD. (Edit: the TBD is now D'ed: These Days are Ours by Michelle Haimoff and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.)
James Warner, Fiction Editor: Heaven on Earth by Richard Landes. King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher. Bambi vs. Godzilla by David Mamet.
Robert Birnbaum, Editor-at-Large: The Snopes (the Snopes Trilogy in a new volume) by Wm Faulkner. The Might Have Been by Joseph Schuster. The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. The Collective by Don Lee. The Street Sweeper by Eliot Perlman. The Reconstructionist (P.S.) by Nick Arvin. Poison Flower by Thomas Perry. Jack Holmes and his Friend by Edmund White. Capitol by John Lancaster. Enchantments by Kathyrn Harrison. Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates. Twilight by William Gay. Watergate by Thomas Mallon.
Hilarie Ashton, Assistant Editor: At long last, Sullivan's Pulphead. I adore it. Also reading Baumbach’s The Life and Times of Major Fiction, and a couple other things that I was reading last month.
Matthew Tiffany, Books Editor: I'm reading Laird Hunt's forthcoming Kind One. I just finished Talking Back to Facebook about how to protect the children from Mark Zuckerberg.
Alexandra Tursi, Visuals Editor: River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh, Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan, Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
Anna-Lynne Williams, Music Editor: On one end of the spectrum, I've been reading Hunger Games while on tour in the Netherlands. Perfect for airplanes and trains. On the other end I've also brought the memoir Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog.
I have to say, for such a strong online publication, there’s a real lack of female writers on your collective reading list. Given recent numbers put out by Vida regarding publication of women writers (http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count) I’d expect to see Identity Theory leading a push to correct such disparities. Will the staff members’ reading lists be reflected in Identity Theory’s content?
Obviously everyone has the right to read whatever they’re intrigued by, but it seems to me that this disparity in publishing starts somewhere, and those in literary publications have a responsibility to take part in efforts to make the publishing world more inclusive. Not just for inclusivity’s sake, but because making a place for diversity in publishing also makes space for fiction and literature to continue transforming in a multiplicity of new, compelling ways.