Note: Author John-Ivan Palmer has been a professional stage hypnotist since 1970 and still performs select shows on a limited basis. Please contact for further information.
MASTER OF DECEPTION, the long-awaited memoir about growing up in the dark and closed world of 1950s floor show culture, is now available at book outlets worldwide. (Depicted on the cover is the author’s father, Jack Pyle.) Nominated for the National Book Award and 2020 INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist.
“Wonderfully entertaining and well-written....what a story he tells.”
— Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Writing with the voice of experience, Palmer lifts the tacky curtain on a world gone away. Tawdry but exciting.”
— David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
“A real eye opener. Information you cannot find in many biographies. Touching, utterly interesting, highly recommended!”
— Marco Pusterla, Ye Old Magic Magazine (UK)
“A trip into a world few of us know or understand.”
— Spectrum West, Wisconsin Public Radio
“Check out this book!”
— Scott Wells, The Magic Word Podcast
“Fiercely observed and intensely uncanny moments...an insider’s story of life among outsiders.
— Thomas Burchfield, Curious Magazin
John-Ivan Palmer, son of a nightclub magician and Croatian actress, grew up in trailer parks and dressing rooms. He taught himself to read and write, forward and backward with either hand, in the back seat of the car en route to his parents’ many engagements. Although he technically never graduated from the first grade he later attended three universities, but did not graduate from any of them either.
On the West Coast, while carrying on his father’s profession, he published journalistic work in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Milwaukee Journal and Oregon Journal. Literary magazines (The Smith, December, NewsArt, Wisconsin Review, Other Voices) published his fiction. As with his schooling, he composed his writing in dressing rooms and hotel lobbies. It should be no surprise that his topics should be as different and diverse as his life. After receiving the Pushcart Prize for fiction, his essays and literary criticism were widely published and anthologized in the US, Britain, Israel and Japan.
Given his background, the author’s work deals with unorthodox narratives, yet in a disciplined, belletristic style. Tom Bradley’s irreverent interview with Palmer in Exquisite Corpse, A Journal of Art and Life (corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=559&Itemid=40) describes the author as an “odd and versatile figure in the literary world.”
Also see feature article on writings and career in Continuum, a publication of the University of Minnesota (2023): continuum.umn.edu/2023/03/a-magicians-deception
Also Recently published:
“Listen to Me! Words and the Amplified Voice,” an essay on the history of speaking to large crowds without a microphone. Whistling Shade Literary Journal, Summer 2020 (http://www.whistlingshade.com/index.html). “How did Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address to 20,000 people using only the wind that came out of his body?”
Two poems “Massage Parlor Honeymoon” and “Face Focus Burn Hole” were written during the author’s period as a night club hypnotist. Issue 9, 2020, of Modern Poetry Quarterly Review (http://www.modernpoetryreview.com/poetry/two-poems-by-john-ivan-palmer/).
“City Deep,” in the anthology Around the World, Landscapes & Cityscapes, 2021.