The Tangential

Thanksgiving Audiobook Review: Rick Moody’s “The Ice Storm”

About the book: Rick Moody’s sophomore novel, following Garden State (1992), was published in 1994 and quickly became a modern classic. It stands alongside Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides as a chronicle of teenage eros in the ’70s, and also became perhaps the definitive fictional story about suburban sexual liberation among the adults of that era. Surprise, surprise: key…

Kenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” Is Everything You’d Hope, and Fear, It Would Be

After a preview screening of Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, the studio asked me to write a concise reaction on a card. I wrote something along the lines of, “A grandly old-fashioned mystery, with a heart.” As my girlfriend and I walked to the car, though, she said she thought the movie was awful.…

Thanksgiving Audiobook Review: Jay McInerney’s “Model Behavior”

About the book: Jay McInerney’s sixth novel was published in 1998, to unenthusiastic reviews. He still hadn’t fulfilled the promise of his acclaimed debut Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and the unmistakable similarities of the new novel to that book were seen as an attempt — perhaps a cynical one — to put a ’90s spin on…

“The Selfie Generation”: Alicia Eler’s New Book Captures Our Digital Moment

Alicia Eler’s new book is called The Selfie Generation, but it could just as well be called The Selfie Moment. It captures the ambiguous promise of this particular point in history, when selfies are the coin of the online realm. Where is all that virtual currency piling up? Just as important as what the book is, is…

Things You Wonder While Watching “Annabelle: Creation”

How does a chair elevator built in the 1940s know whether or not you have the seatbelt fastened? Does the Vatican know about this nun hearing confessions and talking about an apocryphal “Book of Charlotte”? Logically, shouldn’t the disembodied spirit need a body instead of a soul? Why does Janice lean forward in her wheelchair…

Audiobook review: Philip Pullman’s “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage”

At one point in La Belle Sauvage, the child protagonists travel in their eponymous canoe along a stream covered in a high mist. That mist, it’s eventually revealed, marks the boundary between a blithe class of pleasure seekers and the horrors of which they’re willfully ignorant. Eventually, a river god ominously warns, there will be a…

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.”