To those readers who have faithfully read along with us throughout our second year of publication, and to those readers who have just arrived for the first time, we thank you for making our publication successful and enjoyable. With summer in full swing, and friends and family taking time out of their busy lives to enjoy a few moments of rest and respite from the heat, we here at The Offending Adam are likewise hitting the pause button for a brief two week sojourn. So fear not, dear readers: TOA returns with its usual force Monday, August 1. Until then, here are a selection of works that we have published in the first half of 2011, to either read for the first time if you missed them, or to rediscover.

To those readers who have faithfully read along with us for forty-six issues, and to those readers who have just arrived for the first time, we thank you for making this first year of publication successful and enjoyable. With the holidays fast approaching, and friends and family taking time out of their busy lives to enjoy a few moments of rest and community, we here at The Offending Adam are likewise hitting the pause button so that we can fully enjoy the holiday season. Fear not, though, dear readers: TOA returns with punch and power Monday, January 24. Until then, here are a selection of works that we have published in 2010, to either read for the first time if you missed them, or to rediscover.

Holiday sale for Chapvelope One?!? Pre-orders and announcement for Chapvelope Two?!? This must be the holidays...

This year has been a year of surprises. We began the year as a fledgling publication, hoping to gain a few loyal and excited readers. Now, as the year comes to a close, we have been given the opportunity to select the first Pushcart Prize nominees from The Offending Adam. As we had developed a strong connection with every piece of writing we published over the course of the year, this task daunted us. We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank all our contributors this year, who have helped make our first year of publishing such a success. And, in particular, we would like to thank our Pushcart nominees Melissa Kwasny, Laura Mullen, Kelli Anne Noftle, Craig Santos Perez, Chris Shipman, and William Stobb for sharing such striking work with us and our readers. We invite you to read or re-read these poems, and we hope that you find them as interesting and enjoyable as we did.

We here at The Offending Adam consider ourselves so lucky both to be a part of the literary community in our various ways, as well as to have so many loyal readers come here to make this journal a vibrant space for literature. We now invite you to browse nine books that have impressed or excited us, in the hopes that some of them might find a home either with your friends and loved ones or, also, on your own book shelf.

While we normally feature poetry here at The Offending Adam, we are delighted today to present Chuck Rosenthal's piece of magic journalism, "My Chicken, Obsidian," set in Topanga Canyon, a funky residential enclave located outside of Los Angeles. Historian Carey McWilliams' seminal work on California is entitled Southern California: An Island on the Land and while reading Rosenthal's funny, ironic, and poetic portrait, one cannot help but appreciate that sentiment of one who inhabits such a baffling and beautiful island on the land that is Los Angeles and its surrounding locale.

One of the purposes of this journal is to focus on each individual piece of content we publish. We write an introduction for each piece to indicate the relationship we have with the writing. There is not one piece that has been published on this website that we are not proud of and honored to be able to present. In light of this, the task of choosing a selection as our representatives for awards anthologies presented a difficult task. When we have created our own unique relationship with each piece, how do we go about choosing favorites? When Dzanc asked us to do precisely this and nominate three pieces for their annual Best of the Web series, we were both excited and flummoxed. Excited to share and celebrate some of the wonderful work we have been lucky enough to publish. Flummoxed to have to select from all the pieces that we admire so much.

When we began The Offending Adam earlier this year, one of our aims was to truly take advantage of the online medium. We didn’t want to produce yet another online journal that for all intents and purposes took its form from print: monthly or seasonal updates of what were static issues. We wanted to create an interactive experience between writer, reader, and editor and to draw a bridge between those often-disparate entities in this bizarre little process in which we take part. Thus far, however, for all our good intentions we have still been largely confined by text. With our continued progression in mind, I am proud to introduce Ashley David’s “An Elegy: Fine Things, Flip-side(s) & Transformation,” a compelling presentation on postmodern elegy that actively plays and pushes on the boundaries of creative and academic work, one which weaves elements of Roland Barthes, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, David’s own personal history, nursery rhymes, and others. David describes the work as a “performance of theory” and she accomplishes that. It is a piece that embodies all of the qualities we had in mind when beginning our journal.

"The thwarts, the stutters, the choice to not conclude—this isn’t the way I speak when I go to the bank. As Oppen writes, 'We change the speech because we are not explaining, agitating, convincing: we do not know what we already know before we wrote the poems.' And this is part of why I write: I want to know about things, to discover."

"A Natural History" is a compiled text based on journal entries from two different visits to northern Nevada's Black Rock Desert combined with margin notes from my copies of William Fox's The Void, The Grid and The Sign and Sessions Wheeler's Nevada's Black Rock Desert. At some point in my process of arranging, editing, and composing the text toward its finished form (whenever that may occur), the idea of arranging the piece for a three-part vocal performance came to me. I recruited two students of mine whose voices I liked, and we got together to try it out. The "live" performance of the piece worked okay, but sounded a little like church. In production, as I was working to combine various takes, I came to like the mechanical quality that the multi-vocal production brought to the piece. I decided to pursue that mechanical quality, which seemed a little futuristic, but not out of place with the expansive time scale I'd always imagined for "A Natural History." After a couple of long sessions of concentrated work on the audio, this version resulted. I like it, and hope you will.