Bedrock Books has thousands of quality used books for sale at Alibris, Ebay and Amazon. The books on this page are mostly new books, still in print (so available), and offered free of shipping charges if mailed in the United States via Media Mail. More titles will be added soon, so check back often!
By Matt Pavelich
Henry Brusett is the only one who can explain the mysterious death of Calvin Teague. He's the only one who truly knows how the young man came to be bloodied and lifeless on his land in Montana's vast backcountry. But Henry won't say anything. His silence and its ripple across his small community form the heart of Matt Pavelich's engrossing second novel, The Other Shoe.
Henry never wanted much more than a family and his days spent as a sawyer deep in the wilderness. But by middle–age Henry is divorced, disabled, and isolated on a remote plot of land in Montana. After years of self–imposed loneliness, Henry meets Karen, who's half his age and knows nothing but her own willful solitude. Their union is the unlikeliest of bonds, a mix of comfort and guilt for Henry who believes he's too old for Karen. But it's also the spark of his undoing, a decision that leads him toward one of his greatest regrets.
As members of Henry and Karen's small town try to both uncover and cover–up the truth surrounding Calvin Teague's untimely death, The Other Shoe moves toward the inescapable and shines in the rarity of Pavelich's assured and haunting style.
$20.00 postpaid
Published by Counterpoint Press (2012)
Fiction
Hardcover, 334 pages
Weight: 16.1 oz
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Matt Pavelich
In 1865 a baby—a baby too large to pass through anyone’s hips—is born to a couple at the crumbling edge of Europe where the horror of pending war is already in the air. By any measure too large, our hero can develop no patience for his determined, dinky fellows, and so from the Balkan backwater of his birth and his youth as a precocious highwayman, to intrigues at court in Vienna, the problem remains the same—he is by one means and another continually wearing out his welcome.
In this bawdy first novel by Matt Pavelich, Danny Savage migrates to the New World in 1899, where he finally settles an empty, rough corner of Wyoming with his epic shrew of a wife, Stoja. In Savage’s wake are spent empires, ruptured families, collateral lives that have touched and fallen away.
Not since Ken Kesey burst on the scene with Sometimes a Great Notion has the West produced such an exciting and accomplished new novelist. Matt Pavelich has given us a giant’s coat tails to ride upon, let us wear for a while his seven-league boots.
$24.00 postpaid
Published by Counterpoint Press (2005)
Fiction
Hardcover, 288 pages
Weight: 13.5 oz
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Matt Pavelich
One of Montana’s and the West’s finest fiction writers, Matt Pavelich is an author of universal appeal. His earlier books, the collection of stories, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field, and the novels, Our Savage and The Other Shoe, have been acclaimed by both reviewers and fellow authors. With the publication of Survivors Said, his best stories written over four decades, Pavelich reveals extraordinary range and penetrating vision.
“Matt Pavelich is a Montana original. From the very first story of Survivors Said, imagined as a the sole survivor of an early hominid species witnessing the collapse of Lake Missoula, and then on to a bank teller whose life only gets more restricted after a spur of the moment robbery, you’re along for the ride. And what a driver Pavelich is, never missing a turn, but keeping you up on two wheels through most of it. Hang on, he’s taking you places few writers ever have.” - Pete Fromm, author of Dry Rain, Indian Creek Chronicles, and Cool As I Am.
The novelist Gish Jen, author of Typical American and The Love Wife, writes, “What writing! The stories in Survivors Said are of the young and the old, of people getting out and people getting by. They are the voices of a species and a marine and a girl. But all of them are vintage Pavelich: sharp-sighted and phrased just so, they are singularly alert to the worlds in a word.”
$20.00 postpaid
Published by Drumlummon Institute (2015)
First edition, signed
Softcover, 328 pages
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Matt Pavelich
Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field explores the human landscape of the contemporary West in stories that range from complex relationships developed in carefully drawn detail to poignant moments stolen from the lives of people at their most revealingly characteristic. With lean precision and emotional power, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field presents the complexities, joys and sorrows of the modern West and its struggle with history. Here are people whose lives are closely related to the landscape and whose stories reveal a powerfully relevant struggle.
Published by the Montana Arts Council as the winning selection in the 1989 First Book Award Competition. Funding for this project was received, in part, from the National Endowment for the Arts.
$20.00 postpaid
Owl Creek Press, Seattle, WA (1990)
Fiction
Hardcover, 148 pages
Weight: 13.3 oz
Cover Art: Diana Ostby
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Pete Fromm
In this memorable collection of short stories, Pete Fromm reconfirms his reputation as one of the West's most intriguing and talented young writers. Stories about family, love, fealty, commitment, and heroism are all set against the backdrop of the everyday people and events of the American West.
$23.00 postpaid
Publisher: Lyons Press (1997)
First Edition and Signed by the Author
Hardcover
215 pages
Weight: 1.02 lbs.
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Matt Pavelich
The novel begins at the start of the 20th century with Charlie Harrow, erstwhile freighter, and his beloved Dove, schoolmarm and homesteader in her own right, establishing the family farm on Montana’s fabled Square Butte Bench, a “place of taunting, receding horizons.” The novel ends on the same place, with the return of a great-granddaughter intent, unaccountably, on continuing the family operation.
While one member of each generation stays on, and makes the place thrive, others travel far afield, to the killing fields of World War Two, to drug-running adventures off the coast of Morocco, to the jazz clubs of Great Falls and Los Angeles, to military drudgery and tragedy on Okinawa during the Vietnam conflict, to the quiet bookish neighborhoods of Portland.
The intertwining stories of these remarkable Harrows–Charlie and Dove, George and Verity, Tel and Jeet, Carrie and Elizabeth–tell us of a beautiful, often unforgiving place and of what it means to be family, in all our imperfections, our sorrows, and our joys.
$24.00 postpaid
Published by Bar R Books (August 2025)
Fiction
Softcover, 408 pages
Cover Art: Dale Livezey
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
By Matt Pavelich
Matt Pavelich’s stories wait quietly for a reader to discover them, and once they do–drawn in no doubt through a mesmerizing opening line or through seeing newly captured even the most mundane and familiar elements in our lives–they will keep turning pages, unaware of anything else around them until the reverie is broken by impending darkness, and they have to stand up to turn on a lamp so as to keep reading.
From the moment he first appeared on the literary horizon with his Montana Book Award-winning story collection, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field in 1989, Pavelich has distinguished himself as a master of the form, penning story after story (and a few novels along the way) to remind discriminating readers what honest, organic wordsmithing looks like.
Absent any of the lingering electronic glow of the writing factories, Pavelich’s stories gleam like embers in a woodstove; the odors of larch smoke and oranges cling to them the way that true insight comes from hiking alone over the continental divide, or sewing a quilt, or chopping cordwood. If you want to remember what well crafted writing used to mean, get a copy of But Tell It Slant. Actually, get two copies and pass one along to any reader with taste; you’ll have a friend for life.
~ Aaron Parrett, Author, Montana Then and Now
$22.00 postpaid
Published by Bar R Books (August 2025)
Fiction
Softcover, 356 pages
Cover Art: James Gilbert Todd, Jr.
FREE SHIPPING (Media Mail only)
