The Horizontal World - by Debra Marquart (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Debra Marquart grew up on a farm in rural North Dakota--on land her family had worked for generations. From the earliest age she knew she wanted out; surely life had more to offer than this unyielding daily grind, she thought. But she was never able to abandon it completely.

"[A] rich memoir, set in North Dakota, about growing up on and escaping from a family farm for a future that held once unheard-of opportunities as a rock musician, poet, and English teacher." --Chicago Sun-Times

Review Quotes

"Everything Marquart touches gains light and color, from the monotony of the work and the tactics she developed to avoid it to the land itself and the untold price her foremothers paid to settle it."

"Here is the truth: a life deeply regarded. I read this book with fascination, page after page." -- Kent Haruf

"Marquart's memoir eloquently describes the difficulties of growing up in a place, in her case North Dakota, to which you're tightly tied even though you don't fit in there."

"The author's elegant, understated sentences are as fertile as freshly tilled rows of loam."

About the Author

Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University. Her work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater's Prize, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship among others. Marquart's memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the "Elle Lettres" award from Elle magazine, a New York Times Editors' Choice recommendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart is also the author of two poetry collections--Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness--and a collection of interrelated short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician.