fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
Before I even arrived on campus for my freshman year, I had a homework assignment. A copy of James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything had been sent to every incoming freshman at my college and we had been instructed to read it prior to orientation. At the time, this really pissed me [...]
Having loosed a monster that he does not understand and which threatens to destroy him, Ged spends much of A Wizard of Earthsea running. The titular wizard's constant flight eventually leaves him wholly exhausted and on the brink of annihilation, at which point he returns to the mage who was his first master, Ogion. Under [...]
For a lot of upper-middle-class kids like myself, a back-to-school clothes shopping trip was the one chance a year I had to change or cement my look. On a sweltering August day, I'd find myself standing in a Pac Sun, trying to find a pair of jeans that fit and a novelty t-shirt that was [...]
During the interminable hours that are spent rocking my teething son back to sleep in the middle of the night, I've taken to re-reading old books on my Kindle. As I made my way through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my son fussing, squirming and, eventually, sleeping in my arms, I couldn't help [...]
Lately, I've been on a quest to sit down and listen to some of the albums that have been recommended to me over the years and that, for whatever reason, I've overlooked until now. Without further ado, let's take a look at three records that are classics for a lot of people and yet somehow [...]
The ghost barn sat in a wide field, a single light bulb burning atop a lamppost, bathing the cracked wooden beams in a haunted, eerie glow. Try as we might, my friends and I were never able to find that place again. We spent dozens of summer nights driving around for hours at a time, [...]
It's a long-running joke in our house that my wife thinks I only listen to depressing music and, well, she may have a point. So let's infuse a little of that gloom into this most romantic of days by celebrating some of the most miserable "love" songs every written. "Falling in Love" by Lisa Loeb [...]
Maybe it's because I'm not a clocksmith or maybe it's because this is a bizarre thing to even consider but I've never been emotionally attached to a gear. Well, more accurately, I had never been emotionally attached to a gear. And then I read Patrick Rothfuss' The Slow Regard of Silent Things and goddamn if [...]
I learned to play drums by playing Rock Band. For several months, I spent a huge portion of my free time pushing the few pieces of furniture I owned to the periphery of my college apartment so that I could fire up my Xbox and smack wooden sticks against a flimsy contraption made of rubber [...]
A story about a man hiding a beautiful piece of art in a potato barn—it is a Vonnegut book after all—Bluebeard is filled with a cast of characters who are never quite who they present themselves to be. Rabo Karabekian, an aging, cycloptic painter who sits at the novel's center is portrayed as a crusty [...]
Songs & Stories 