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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
One of the presents that my wife and I received after our wedding was a Vera Wang crystal bowl. It's a striking piece but given that we've lived in a small bungalow with tight hallways and crowded rooms for the entire five years that we've been married, there was no place to put such a [...]
An Air Gradia jetliner rolls slowly down the tarmac at a crowded airport, past the teeming gates and packed terminals. It weaves a careful path to the farthest reach of the concrete, to the most isolated location possible, before it comes to a stop. Its doors never open. Of the many indelible images of Emily [...]
At the north end of downtown Ann Arbor, sitting on Main Street between a coffee shop and a catering company, there's a German-themed restaurant called Heidelberg. The first floor features a traditional dining room while the basement is a rathskeller where you'll find a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to drink das boot. Above both of [...]
The Nintendo 64 was the first video game system that really and truly impressed me. The flat graphics of the 16-bit generation were, from my adolescent viewpoint, limited but the N64 presented games in three dimensions, changing what video games could be and allowing for a previously inconceivable level of immersion. And while the Sony [...]
Roughly halfway through Hank Green's debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, protagonist April May steps back from her story of alien statues, cable news blowhards and contagious dreams to evaluate and identify the varying tiers of celebrity. It's an instructive moment that allows Green to examine his own position in the hierarchy of the famous [...]
It may be that the final campfire scene in Final Fantasy XV is the single most emotional moment I've ever experienced through a video game. After spending 50-some odd hours with Noctis and his lovable band of dude-bros, having been absorbed into their friendships through a near-endless Road Trip to Save the World and subsequently [...]
Okay, so that title is misleading. These aren't necessarily the best albums of 2017 - who am I to judge? - but they're certainly the new releases that I enjoyed most this year. (Presented alphabetically by artist.) I'm Only Dreaming by Eisley By the end of the album's very first song, it's clear that I'm [...]
Songs & Stories 