Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

HOW TO DISAPPEAR

Akiko Busch

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

In this exploration of the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, the author searches for a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today's increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world.

In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting and yet fanciful. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and self-promote. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but vast and pervasive technology companies wishing to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life--for invisibility.

With this urgent and welcome message, she overturns the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Finding genuine alternatives to the typical life of perpetual exposure through travel, meditation, nature, literature, solitude (and a fascinating look into virtual reality), she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and invasive world.

Akiko Busch is the author of several essay collections, including NINE WAYS TO CROSS A RIVER, a series of linked essays about swimming across American rivers and THE INCIDENTAL STEWARD, awarded an Honorable Mention in the Natural History Literature category of 2013 National Outdoor Book Awards. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her work has appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Available products
Book Published 2019-02-12 by Penguin Press
Book Published 2019-02-12 by Penguin Press

Comments

Kafka dreamt of being a waiter. He wanted to be present but invisible. Akiko Busch has illuminated this essential part of being. Examining with a clear lyricism, what it means to protect yourself from too much visibility. Her work offers a much needed sense of balance in a time of turmoil. A reminder that we can shift and change and that there is such a thing as privacy.

What a perfect moment for this beautiful and affecting book. Aki Busch writes with grace, humor and breathtaking precision about the unsung virtues of blending in rather than standing out, of finding our most essential selves by losing our need to be perpetually seen. Weaving together science, myth and storytelling, anecdotes from Iceland to Grand Cayman Island, the Bay of Fundy to a virtual reality studio in Brooklyn, she reminds us that it is often in those all-consuming moments of losing ourselves - in love, in work, in the natural world - that we see and feel most acutely, that how to be depends on knowing both how to be fully present and how to disappear. This is a book that will be passed from friend to friend like a secret handshake - a must read.

...the book touches on an abiding, but easily forgotten, truth: Disappearing, the act of losing our selves, is a precondition of selflessness. Ms. Busch's deeper concern is to save not Narcissus but rather the wider world his selfishness affects. Read more...

What a mesmerizing, unexpected, and hopeful book this is. A wondrous magic hat of revelations on the power of the unseen - to disappear into, lose oneself in, and emerge transformed, with new hope for the possibility of a surer, quieter, more humane way of being.

What a stunning, intelligent book! And timely in these times of endless exposure. Akiko Busch leaves no pebble unturned in her contemplation of invisibility in all of its myriad guises, many of which will surprise you, and in the course of things her contemplation becomes a search for one's place in nothing less than the flow of life itself.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR by Akiko Busch is reviewed on the *cover* of the Feb. 24 issue of the New York Times Book Review! : ...For [Busch], invisibility is not simply a negative, the inverse of visibility. Going unseen, undetected, overlooked: These are experiences with their own inherent 'meaning and power'; what we need is a 'field guide' for recognizing them. And this is what Busch offers... Read more...

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