Silver medal honors in the memoir category go to Debra Marquart's most recent book, The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging. The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award program, which include fifty-six categories recognizing excellence in book...
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The Horizontal World
By Debra Marquart

Praise for
The Horizontal World
—Lee Martin, author of From Our House and The Bright Forever

—Brett Lott, author of Jewell

—Julia Scheeres, New York Times Book Review

—Brett Lott, author of Jewell
The Night We Landed On The Moon
By Debra Marquart


Praise for
THe Night We Landed on the Moon
—K. L. Cook, author of Marrying Kind and The Art of Disobedience

“Each of these seductive essays reads like a finely honed musical piece, its tones and melodies spun together by a masterful conductor. Moving from the serious to the playful, Marquart combines longings for a lost past with hope for new familial connections, weaving in environmental concerns, and always evoking a compelling sense of place. Whether her stories are set in North Dakota or farther afield, and whether she’s talking about the loss of wildness, the feeling of exile or some other personal loss, we know a wink of humor will arise at some point in her voice, and that we, like the king in Scheherazade’s tales, will want to hear another tale in the morning.”
—Sheryl St. Germain, author of Fifty Miles

“These essays rule. They’re about everything. North Dakota, obviously, and time and grief and sex and loss and weather, but also subtler wonders: chokecherry jelly, knoephla, proper road trip snacks including Dot’s Homestyle pretzels (which thanks to Debra Marquart I also now sing the praises of), the indestructibility of mothers, and the importance and fragility of the best shade trees. Perhaps her best trick is to get us to fall in love again with the places we’ve left, even if we’ve not ever left them fully. Marquart’s Midwest is “a true place full of open secrets…delicious and horrifying,” which perfectly describes this book.”
—Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer: Essays

“At the heart of Debra Marquart’s The Night We Landed on the Moon is this compelling quest: how do we come to understand the places that formed our bones, the places that shape how we think about the world? From the American Great Plains to olive groves in Greece to the Catacombs in Paris to her family’s ancestral home in Russia, she wonders, how do we locate ourselves in the interior and exterior landscapes of a community and how do we come to dwell in spaces of presence and absence? In the end, this lovely book pushes us all to question where and how and to whom we belong.”
—Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer.