“Coming upon [How to Disappear] was like finding the Advil bottle in the medicine cabinet after stumbling about with a headache for a long time.... 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, roaming from essay to essay in a loose, associative style, following invisibility where it takes her.... Inconspicuousness can be powerful - this may be Busch’s most radical point, especially at a moment when we’re conditioned to think power means yelling louder than everyone else in your Twitter feed, or showing the world in Instagram how you’re living your best life.... Silence and invisibility, [Busch insists], are part of our everyday lives - the place our mind wanders when we’re in the shower or out jogging, the feeling we get looking out the window of an airplane, the pleasure of becoming a stranger on a bustling city street. We take these pauses, these moments of exhalation, for granted, but we should clutch them close. They are our armor against the onslaught.” (Gal Beckerman, The New York Times Book Review, cover review)

“Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency serves as a gentle reminder...[to] stop confusing what is most obvious or distracting for what is genuinely important. Almost everything that actually matters in life happens beneath the surface. Ms. Busch, who has rightly been compared to Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey, has dedicated nearly 30 years to sounding this message, one that our age seems intent on ignoring.... It is precisely Ms. Busch’s subtle contrarianism that deserves our sustained attention.... How to Disappear is, at least in part, a description of how the world might reappear to us if we weren’t so hellbent on overwhelming it.... On the surface, How to Disappear is a palliative for the alienation that modern overexposure begets. Ms. Busch would like to save us from ourselves, from the lonely fate that afflicts Narcissus, his eyes forever locked on the only person he has ever truly loved - himself. But in its deeper moments, 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.” (John Kaag, Wall Street Journal)

“In this provocative series of essays, Busch examines how social media and the surveillance economy have redefined the way we live.... Throughout, she asks important questions about the consequences of hypervisibility.” (BBC Culture, Ten Books to Read this February)