From risque cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, "Trade of the Tricks" offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing Paris magic scene as an apprentice, Graham M. Jones gives a firsthand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. He follows the day-to-day lives of some of France's most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, Jones shows how today's magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book's lively cast of characters includes female and queer performers whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.

Graham Jones is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, whose research focuses on knowledge and rationality in practice, performance, and interaction generally. After studying literature at Reed College (BA, 1998) and anthropology at New York University (PhD, 2007), he was a postdoctoral member of the Princeton Society of Fellows (2007-2010). Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in France, his book Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft (California, 2011) explores the production, circulation, and display of secrets within the subculture of entertainment magic. Focusing on forms of performance that blur boundaries between enchantment and disenchantment, he has also written about intercultural magic performances in colonial contact zones, and the resignification of magical practices by evangelical Christian conjurers. Collaborating with Bambi B. Schieffelin, he has written extensively about the linguistic dimensions of Computer-Mediated Communication, with a particular focus on reflexive language. At MIT, he teaches classes on a range of subjects, including: the anthropology of play; the language of mediated communication; and ethnographic research methods.