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 [...]
Reading is an inherently independent activity so if there's anything unusual about my reading The Lord of the Rings every year, it's limited to the fact that I read The Lord of the Rings every year and not that I do so alone. Most years, after I finish that reading, I watch Peter Jackson's trilogy [...]
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 [...]
Ursula K. Le Guin, my hero, died on a Monday. On the Wednesday that preceded her passing, only five days before her death, I sent her the only piece of fan mail I've ever written. In it, I struggled to contain and express the boundless praise and thanks due to a woman who, despite our [...]
Following up on Monday's musical retrospective, it's time to award some superlatives to the books that I read in 2014. Straying even farther from release dates than with my musical entry, this list reflects books that I read in 2014, not necessarily books that were released this year. Most Hyped Book (That I Didn't Really Like) - [...]
Let's get this out of the way upfront: Ursula Le Guin is a master of the bildungsroman. A Wizard of Earthea, The Farthest Shore, Malafrena, and several of her other books are among the finest coming of age novels in American literature. There are few authors capable of elucidating the challenges of personal discovery the [...]
Songs & Stories 