The Tangential

Movie Review: “Lizzie” Reimagines the Borden Story as a Parable of Patriarchy

If Lizzie feels particularly poignant in the wake of the 2016 election, it’s not because it’s newly relevant: it’s because it feels freshly futile. A two-hour dramatization of flagrant disdain for women and the corrosive effects of male privilege? Sounds a lot like a presidential debate. Those who aren’t up on their true-crime history may be surprised…

Book Review: “50 Art Movements You Should Know” Covers 170 Years In 139 Pages

Everyone says “humbling” these days when they actually mean “flattering.” If you want to genuinely talk about “humbling,” think about how, say, Theo van Doesburg might feel if he’d lived to see Rosalind Ormiston’s 50 Art Movements You Should Know. Sure, van Doesburg was a leading light of Concrete Art — but in the grand sweep…

Re-reading William Sleator; or, We’re All Living in a Steel Playhouse Where Time Speeds Up

I just reread, for the first time since I was a teenager, one of my favorite young adult novels: Singularity, by William Sleator. I didn’t remember the monster plot, or the neighbor girl who befriends the twin-brother protagonists: Harry and Barry. What I vividly remembered was the brothers’ discovery of a playhouse where time speeds up,…

Do Golfers Go To Heaven? (An Unfinished Novel)

There was once a great golfer named Bill Kilroy. Born in 1920 to a rich professor at the University of Minnesota and his lovely, respectable, and sexy wife, the young William (he later adopted Bill for tax purposes — don’t ask me) was introduced to the royal and ancient game at the tender age of…

Review: “Solo” Audiobooks Bring an (Overly) Expanded Star Wars Story Into Your Earbuds

The idea that a novelization represents an “expanded edition” of a movie is not news to anyone who met Camie and Fixer in the original Star Wars novel, or who first read the name “Palpatine” in James Kahn’s 1983 Return of the Jedi novelization. Lucasfilm is now capitalizing on the idea, though: instead of releasing the books…

Movie Review: “The Predator”: This Dog Don’t Hunt

Thought experiment: what if Shane Black had directed Annihilation, and 20th Century Fox tapped Alex Garland to direct The Predator? The latter film would have haunting intervals where its dudes with guns contemplated the creative ways the Predator(s) found to kill their friends in the forest; the former would have its female cast cracking offensive jokes and…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”