fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
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 [...]
There is a certain anxiety inherent to a new release from one of your favorite bands, especially if it's a reunion album. The upside is obvious - you're fairly likely to enjoy a new album from a band that you already like. And yet what if you don't like the new release because it, in no [...]
When The Dear Hunter released The Color Spectrum in 2011, much like when Thrice released The Alchemy Index throughout 2007 and 2008, a truly massive and ambitious project was born into the world. Somewhat inevitable, then, was the reality that for each band, their next release would be significantly less ambitious. Thrice followed their sonically experimental quadripartite foray into the [...]
By the time Straylight Run released their About Time EP, I had pretty much given up on the band. Like most of my peers, I had a special place in my heart for the melancholic angst parade that was Straylight Run (2004); and when the Prepare to Be Wrong EP was released in 2005, I found that I quite enjoyed it's [...]
As regular readers of Type In Stereo will recall, on the heels of two Coheed albums that I didn't much care for, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Coheed & Cambria's 2012 release, The Afterman: Ascension. Being the first in a two-part, back-to-back release schedule, Ascension's success had me eagerly anticipating 2013's The Afterman: Descension. Well, Descension is [...]
"Sing along if you want. Knowing the words is not required." Who wouldn't want to listen to an album with that kind of tagline? After reading that description for Venna by Venna (FVBV - a latinate FUBU?), I assumed that Third Generation Hymnals would be filled with soaring harmonies and rousing group vocals - the kind of [...]
After the splintering of my beloved Gatsbys American Dream, its members went off to participate in a variety of diverse projects - Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground, Search/Rescue and Places and Numbers, to name a few - but only a handful of those acts ever released any actual albums, and only one of those releases prominently featured Gatsbys' [...]
Only a few short weeks ago, I offered up Gates' You Are All You Have Left to Fear and Owel's I've Seen Colors (released under Owel's former band name, Old Nick) as the best albums that 2012 had to offer. I also promised that we'd be revisiting Owel soon, for their upcoming full length record. Well, that time has come. This [...]
Songs & Stories 