Survivors Said — 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. Now, with the publication of Survivors Said, his best stories written over four decades, Pavelich reveals extraordinary range and penetrating vision. As 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. . . . [A]ll of them are vintage Pavelich: sharp-sighted and phrased just so, they are singularly alert to the worlds in a word.” In praising Pavelich's second novel , Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone, wrote, “Matt Pavelich is a native Montanan, he knows that world inside and out, and The Other Shoe is rich with details that convince, insights that amaze. His prose is among the most impressive now being written, elegant, nuanced, rough when needed, the high and low of language. The Other Shoe, is a brilliant novel of crime, love, and the American West, and it deserves a wide readership.” The late Evan S. Connell, bestselling author of Son of the Morning Star and Mrs. Bridge, called Pavelich's first novel Our Savage “an extraordinary book, more Continental than American. . . . I don't know anything like it in our literature. . . . Matt Pavelich is uncommonly vital and original.” Writing in the Washington Post, Lizzie Skurnick wrote: “Some authors can master domestic scenes, and others are successful at handling sweeping, historical tableaux, but Pavelich is the rare writer who can skillfully combine the two.” In an interview in Narrative Magazine, Jack Shoemaker, Pavelich's publisher for both novels, even claimed: “We published what is in my opinion the best novel to come out of the West since Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion -- a book called Our Savage by Matt Pavelich.” Matt Pavelich makes his home in Hot Springs, Montana.