Helena, MT and San Francisco
Bar R Books celebrate the art and literature of Montana and the West. The press’s name derives from the cattle brand owned by Louis Kaufman and Louis Stadler, Helena, Montana, butchers who became prominent cattlemen during the open range days of the Montana frontier. Louis Kaufman was the rancher to whom Charlie Russell sent his famous watercolor, Waiting for a Chinook, during the disastrous winter of 1886-87.
Now Available! Matt Pavelich’s The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century and But Tell It Slant: Fierce Fictions
To purchase, visit Bedrock Books, Helena, MT, online.
Also available from your local bookseller, alibris.com, Bookshop.org, Amazon, and other online booksellers. Booksellers & Libraries: These titles available through Ingram.
The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century
Matt Pavelich
Cover art: Dale Livezey
Bar R Books
Softcover, 408 pages
Fiction, $24.95
“Matt Pavelich has done something wondrous in The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century (Bar R Books, $24.95). This five-generation story of the Harrow family rolls off the pages with such liquid grace and poetic clarity that one feels a new Montana classic has just been penned, one fitting a list shared by A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Big Sky, Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, and Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky.”
Marc Beaudin,
Big Sky Journal, Winter 2025
“I read and enjoyed some excerpts from [The Harrows] a few months before it was published. So I was excited when it landed on my desk. Then I stayed excited through the entire book. It’s the best thing I’ve read in a long time. . . .
“At first, I thought the subtitle [A Novel of the American Century] was a bit grandiose. But as I kept turning pages (sometimes forcing myself to slow down), I understood it better. It’s a saga that’s truly American, full of labor and risk and a lust for freedom, with a little greed and a sprinkling of bonehead plays. That’s about as American as it gets.”
Scott McMillion, “Editor’s Pick,”
Montana Quarterly, Winter 2025
From the Publisher:
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.
But Tell It Slant: Fierce Fictions
Matt Pavelich
Cover art: James Gilbert Todd, Jr.
Bar R Books
Softcover, 356 pages
Fiction, $24.95
“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
About Matt Pavelich
Matt Pavelich was born on the Flathead Indian Reservation. He is not native American. On the ranch where he was raised, his were mostly urban interests, but country manners followed him to town and through a lengthy education that further confused the issue. He was a pacifist in the Marine Corps, then a day laborer who never successfully paired a strong back with a strong mind. He has been a bad pilot and a peculiar lawyer. He is a thrice-married bachelor.
While it seems this tendency to be a poor fit has served him pretty poorly, it does have its uses for Pavelich the writer. He belongs only to his craft and the rich murk of thought and sensation he might stir with it. Standing outside, Pavelich is constantly discovering in his work how he stands there, outside, with nearly all of humanity.
The attention he lavishes on the rhythm, timbre, and pace of his language was evident from his earliest published stories, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field. Pavelich uses musicality to serve up constantly shifting moods. In the novel, Our Savage, he dared to occupy as a fictionist times, situations, and personalities he might only research in his imagination; thus the story of a giant, told in naturalistic terms, making his way from the court of the Holy Roman Empire to a Wyoming coal camp. In The Other Shoe, Pavelich walks a cast of innocents painfully through his musings on justice. In Survivors Said the people of his stories do just that, survive, an often mixed blessing.
For Pavelich, it seems, the purpose of life is life itself, and perhaps a song to properly sing it.
Other Books by Matt Pavelich
Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field: Stories (Owl Creek Press, 1990)
Our Savage: A Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004)
The Other Shoe: A Novel (Counterpoint, 2012)
Survivors Said: Stories (Drumlummon Institute, 2015)
Himself, Adrift: An Account of the Mysterious Disappearance of Thomas Francis Meagher; illustrated with photo-collages by Peter Rutledge Koch (The Territorial Press/Peter Koch Printers, 2015)
RECENT: June 2024
A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022
Rick Newby
Published by Drumlummon Institute in association with Bar R Books, 2024
Softcover, 480 pages
Essays, $35
“As indicated in the title [A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022], these essays are “mostly” but not all about Montana. What Newby has written over the last 40-some years is about place to be sure, but his text is more about the intersection of art and ideas and the interaction between people and place. Consider his essays on the Japanese-born ceramist Akio Takamori about whom Newby published articles in New York (American Ceramics) and Australia (Ceramics: Art and Perception). . .
.
“Newby describes a rich intellectual and creative tradition in Montana that has drawn his close attention for decades. Trained as a poet, he is a self-taught art historian and critic actualized through his joyful interaction with art. Through his articulation of the works of others, he proves himself to be the consummate regionalist in the newest and best sense of the word, for he is the touch point in these global intersections. In this formidable book Newby gathers together his writing about a slice of cultural production that beautifully reveals, through many media over several years, the type of regionalism that does not “give in to the worst kinds of retrograde mythologies” about the West. He addresses the true regionalism of our age, one that offers nuance, not stereotypes, and connection, not isolation. More than can be described with the “cosmopolitan” model, however, Newby’s work rejects the type of transactional and performative exchange that often characterizes regionalism. Rather, he is a critical part of the nexus of interchange and influence of Montana arts.”
Rachel McLean Sailor, Art & Art History Program, University of Wyoming
Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Summer 2024
Other Titles from Bar R Books
Director Ambrose Mysteries: A Trilogy, by Drew Forney Livesay (forthcoming)
Back in Time: A Short Story Collection, by Drew Forney Livesay (forthcoming)
Art in the Collections of the Montana Historical Society, Holter Museum of Art, & Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art: Gifts of Margaret Regan Gans & Joe Freeman Gans, Liz Gans & Rick Newby, 2012-2024, introductory essay by Rick Newby (forthcoming)
Highway Orange: A Collection of Short Fiction, by Drew Forney Livesay (2023). Out of Print.
Unbound! The Passion of Incarcerated Artists, photographs by Peter Merts (2021)
Vintage Toy Cars Around the World, by Drew Forney Livesay; photographs by Geoff Wyatt (2021) Out of Print.
Memories of Childhood, art & text by Theodore Waddell (2018)
Out of Kilter and Other Stories, by Drew Forney Livesay (2018) Out of Print.
Tucker Tees Off, text by Lynn Campion; art by Theodore Waddell (2015)
Tucker’s Seasonal Words of Wisdom, text by Lynn Campion; art by Theodore Waddell (2014)
Rick Newby, Writer & Editor 