Cultural Writing. Essays. SEANCE is a volume of readings and papers on the subject of the condition of language and narrative in contemporary writing. Pairing poetic formalists and sex writers, language poets and pataphyscial researchers, the collection examines the translation of the ordinary into words, from the extraordinary writing of sex to the supposed disappearance of the author. Further sections are on the phenomenological training of the person, radical artifice, and the magic of letters freed from the grid of the page. Among the short stories, poems and essays are texts by Charles Bernstein, Dodie Bellamy, Christian Bök, Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, Kenneth Goldsmith, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Eileen Myles, and Joan Retallack.