Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth's cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein's secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven?

From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination.

George Saunders' Pastoralia is an exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America, merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of the Simpsons. In his entry in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Charles Holdefer addresses how Saunders captures the pain and absurdity of the American service sector, and does justice to the dignity of the people who struggle there.

Charles Holdefer has published four novels with the Permanent Press. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines, including the New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, Slice, and Yellow Silk. His story The Raptor won a Pushcart Prize in 2016. Holdefer grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France.

Fiction. This darkly humorous collection of short fiction by Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor and Back in the Game, revolves gracefully around an esoteric and, it goes without saying, entirely fictional account of the imaginary formative years of someone who at times resembles America's most notorious-so far!-Vice President. This center provides a jumping-off point for free-wheeling, fanciful explorations, both poetic and satirical, into the archaeology of the banality of evil, that reveal, with a light touch and forgiving good humor, the soul-distorting burdens of duty, repression and narcissism in our daily life.

Fiction. Art. Illustrated by Royce M. Becker. Charles Holdefer, author of DICK CHENEY IN SHORTS, The Contractor, and Back in the Game, has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world's longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.

Fiction. Who's the real Mr. Boots?

Erich Ambrose fools people for a living. It's a family tradition. But when a party stunt goes disastrously wrong, he finds himself in deep trouble, on the run through Chicago streets and northern woods, matching wits with the FBI and national security agents and money launderers, all while trying to please a violent homecoming queen and a badass rabbit.

Humorous and probing, BRING ME THE HEAD OF MR. BOOTS is a story of how our past haunts the present, and how the cruelest tricks are the ones we play on ourselves.

When an ex-basketball star and poetry aficionado discovers lost love letters from Emily Dickinson to an unknown Irish lover, she must confront academic conformism and risk embarrassing exposure in order to defend larger truths about American culture in a nation still divided by war.

Meet Holly Winegarten, a campus celebrity and painfully self-conscious young woman trying to come to terms with being six feet, nine inches tall. Sidelined by injury from a basketball career, she develops an affinity for literature and accidentally discovers secret correspondence by an American literary icon famed for her self-effacement. Holly learns that Emily Dickinson's clandestine lover was an immigrant Irish workingman who served as a wartime substitute for her cherished brother, Austin. Holly's discoveries make her the envy of academic careerists, who aren't afraid to play dirty.

Also on Holly's mind: the future of her own misfit brother, Honus, her relationship with her father and coach, Art, and her unexpected friendship with a reviled professor. Holly longs for intimacy in a world where appearances rule, and she must find a way to push back against a university compromised by intellectual fashions and insulated from Americans who serve in today's foreign wars.

Humorous and poignant, Don't Look at Me is an unblinking portrait of how literature still excites and disrupts our lives.