The Tangential

“A Wrinkle In Time” Is the Book Adaptation It Was Worth Waiting Half a Century For

Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer has been hailed as “the King of Weird Fiction.” The Queen Mother, surely, must be Madeleine L’Engle, who’s been keeping young adult fiction trippy since the Kennedy Administration. Her masterpiece A Wrinkle in Time takes its young heroine Meg across folds in time and space on a quest to rescue her father from…

Audiobook Review: Laura Lippman’s “Sunburn” is Dazzlingly Bad

Walking out of a Naked Lunch screening, The Simpsons’ Nelson said, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” There’s at least one thing wrong with the title of Laura Lippman’s Sunburn, although you’d be a fool to choose this book over Naked Lunch no matter how you feel about the Beat Generation. It’s 1995,…

“Annihilation” Tastes a Rainbow of Gruesome Death

Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation is, as the New Yorker describes, a paradigm of “weird fiction.” The first volume of his Southern Reach trilogy, all published in 2014, the book doesn’t develop along the lines you’d expect, and its surrealistic imagery develops into an elaborate, unresolved meta-allegorical conceit. That doesn’t sound like the stuff of a page-turner,…

Here’s the “Black Panther” Rave Review You Don’t Need

Critics were asked to avoid spoilers when reviewing Black Panther and so I will, but really, nothing I could write could in any meaningful way “spoil” the experience of this movie. It’s a historic film, an unprecedented convergence of black talent led by an African-American creative team with a result that splashes across the screen with the…

We Need Another Winter Olympics ‘Miracle,’ and We Don’t Need to Score a Single Goal to Do It

The U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame sits high on a ridge off a highway in Eveleth, Minnesota. In front of the boxy building stands a sculpture of a raised hockey glove holding a stick that isn’t quite proportionate in size. When I walked past the glove and signed the visitors’ log one afternoon last fall,…

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.”