fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
One of the hardest things to do as a writer is put your reader squarely in the mind of a unique and intricate character. Mark Haddon, with The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, has done this just about as well as anyone I've ever read. Through the eyes of Christopher John Francis [...]
I once told a friend that I didn't have any guilty pleasures because I don't understand feeling guilty about whatever art you happen to enjoy. This remains true. However, as we've seen, sometimes this lack of guilt/shame means that I end up investing in works for which I am way, way outside of the target [...]
Caitlin often chastises me for being the kind of person who recommends a lot of books and very rarely accepts (and subsequently reads) the recommendations of others. She is, of course, very right about all of this. So, partly in an effort to appease her and partly to see how the other side lives, I [...]
No one really compares to Kurt Vonnegut, do they? His voice was so unique among his peers that it became almost instantly recognizable. And it first fully took shape in 1959's The Sirens of Titan. Following on the relatively unremarkable heels of Player Piano, his 1952 debut, The Sirens of Titan is brimming with the sharp wit and [...]
An Abundance of Katherines is a book about an anagrammatically-minded child prodigy struggling with the fact that he might not be so special after all. It's also a book about a romance-predicting algorithm, a road trip, and coming out of your shell. Oh, and it's kind of a comedy. It's a complicated - and excellent [...]
When I was younger I would listen to the same CD on repeat for hours upon hours and days upon days. I would come home from school and go up to my room and before I sat down to do my homework, play video games, or watch the Red Wings I'd hit the PLAY button on [...]
When I recently suggested to Caitlin that she should read a couple of John Green's books - that I thought she would like them - the resulting conversation went a little something like this: CAITLIN IS ON THE COUCH, WATCHING FINDING BIGFOOT. BRENNAN ENTERS, STAGE LEFT. Brennan: You should really read a couple of John Green's [...]
There can be little debate that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) was prescient. It imagined a digital landscape (the Metaverse) that bears a striking resemblance to a number of current-day e-communities like Second Life or even the World of Warcraft. It also described a massive future shift in the capitalist power structure that allowed for corporatocracy to replace [...]
Spells and enchantments are enticing to writers because they suggest that words - the writer's most beloved commodity - have power and value beyond what simply appears on the page. And in 1968 Ursula LeGuin incorporated the similarities between writing and magic into her masterful bildungsroman A Wizard of Earthsea. Long before Harry Potter, A Wizard of Earthsea is the [...]
Over the last few days I've been reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and last night when I put the book down and went to bed I had about 60 pages remaining until the book's end. Which creates an interesting conundrum: caught in the sweep up to its climax, I want to finish the book as soon as [...]
Songs & Stories 