fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
One of my favorite places on earth is completely and utterly ordinary and that's okay. Powell's City of Books, located in the heart of Portland, is subdivided into rooms identified by color. In the Blue Room you'll find literature and poetry. Philosophy and self-help are in the Purple Room. Each room, like a dog on [...]
I don't take the words of Ursula K. Le Guin lightly. So when a review of Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon pushed me to learn more about the book, I soon found myself reading the Le Guin quote that sits atop Joey Hi-Fi's magnificent cover art. "There's more imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor's work," says [...]
We're five months into a global pandemic and the world is (still) on fire. If you listen closely, above the raucous tumult of daily news briefings and abrasively selfish protestors, you can hear the soft whine of every single person on earth collectively screaming through clenched teeth. We all need a break. We all need [...]
Rocannon's World may not be one of the first dozen Ursula K. Le Guin books that I'd recommend but the novel did birth a legacy that, rather appropriately, stretches through time from the story's 1966 publication through the present day. Needing a means of communication that could bridge the time-dilation gap of faster than light [...]
Tehanu, the fourth entry in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, is difficult and, much as it pains me to say this about anything Le Guin wrote, often unenjoyable. Trading in the adventure and excitement of its predecessors, Tehanu focuses not on large-scale, world-altering conflicts but instead on the small, mundane acts that shape a [...]
"As long ago as forever, as far away as Selidor..." It's fitting that Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore has its own vernacular for "once upon a time" because, of all of Le Guin's heroic tales, The Farthest Shore is perhaps the most archetypal. The story traces the arc of young Arren, a rural [...]
Worldbuilding is exhausting. It requires a massive amount of mental energy to imagine and then codify an entirely new world with all its nooks and crannies, its politics and customs. To expedite this process, many works of fantasy rely on familiar tropes as a shortcut, allowing vast institutions to be explained away by a few [...]
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 [...]
Songs & Stories 