DriftScribe

Queer feminist, liberal socialist, abolitionist she/her | PhD-ing | Chinese in the U.S. mostly nonfiction, always on hunt for books on topics I’m into

715 points

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My Taste

dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Reading...

Post from the The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America forum

DriftScribe

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The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

Naomi Murakawa

The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the 20th century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to 65% black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state--a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos--was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after. Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republican and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right'--physical safety--eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America.

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

DriftScribe

Mar 13, 2026

2.5

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

A quick nonfiction read that mixes art criticism with a kind of wandering through the city. Each chapter moves through the work and lives of different artists, using them as a way to think about loneliness. Through them, the author also finds her way around New York and places the subject within an urban setting. It’s great to know that travel essays haven’t died out from nonfiction writing.

What made me a little uneasy is that the book frames loneliness as something deeply personal, yet then goes on to probe the lives of these artists to trace it there. Reading it with that idea in mind sometimes felt like peering into their private wounds, almost as if I was intruding on something that wasn’t really meant to be looked at so closely. At times it even felt a bit invasive, as if loneliness was being uncovered in places where it might not have wanted to be named.

Also, being alone doesn’t necessarily mean being lonely, and loneliness itself isn’t always something negative. But throughout the book it’s mostly treated as something heavy and inescapable, almost like a condition people are stuck with.

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives -- from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to the depredations of the AIDS crisis -- Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.

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Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

Virginia Roberts Giuffre

The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalyzed his fall from grace. But her story has never been told in full, in her own words—until now. In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published. Nobody’s Girl is the riveting and powerful story of an ordinary girl who would grow up to confront extraordinary adversity. Here, Giuffre offers an unsparing and definitive account of her time with Epstein and Maxwell, who trafficked her and others to numerous prominent men. She also details the molestation she suffered as a child, as well as her daring escape from Epstein and Maxwell’s grasp at nineteen. Giuffre remade her life from scratch and summoned the courage to not only hold her abusers to account but also advocate for other victims. The pages of Nobody’s Girl preserve her voice—and her legacy—forever. Nobody’s Girl is an astonishing affirmation of Giuffre’s unshakable will—first, to claw her way out of victimhood, and then to shine light on wrongdoing and fight for a safer, fairer world. Equal parts intimate and fierce, it is a remarkable narrative of fortitude in the face of depravity and despair.

DriftScribe TBR'd a book

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine

Nada Elia

An inspiring and intersectional re-imagining of the path to liberation in Palestine 'An inspiring call to action that deconstructs the many oppressive systems we currently find ourselves struggling against' - Adam Horowitz, Mondoweiss How is the struggle for Palestinian freedom bound up in other freedom struggles, and how are activists coming together globally to achieve justice and liberation for all? In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hyper militarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation, and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine's fate is linked through bonds of solidarity with other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. She also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, including that of Native Americans. Greater than the Sum of Our Parts is a powerful and hopeful account, highlighting the role of the Palestinian diaspora, youth, and women, and inspired by activists across the world.

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

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We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Rachel Kuo

A groundbreaking anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarity between Black and Asian feminists, helping us make sense of the world we’re in and the world we must imagine and build. For many in the US and abroad, calls to #SayHerName, the uptick in violence against Asian Americans throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings remain raw and unhealed. Create the World Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities contextualizes a cross-racial feminist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Taken together, the pieces remind us that wherever there is struggle against oppressive systems, there is great possibility for empathy, respect, and solidarity.A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, this unprecedented work brings together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, introducing readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism. The anthology wrestles with contemporary feminism through a multitude of angles—from the Combahee River Collective to nail salons and massage parlors, from misogynoir to the model minority myth.This innovative anthology features poetry, critical essays, interviews, creative nonfiction, and other contributions by Barbara Smith, Tamara Nopper, Franny Choi, Sonya Renee Taylor, and other vital, radical, feminist voices.

DriftScribe commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

pachinko

favourite indie publishers?

i love that independent publishing houses invest in niche genres, authors of underrepresented demographics, and unconventional narratives. often they also offer authors better support and control over their work.

i’ve noticed a resurgence here in the UK since the pandemic slump, and have been trying to support them & advocate them as best i can!

some faves:

Tilted Axis Press (mainly contemporary lit in translation from Asian authors)
Fitzcarraldo Editions (ambitious, acclaimed, sometimes unconventional)
Dead Ink (bold, experimental, often debuts)
And Other Stories (diverse authors, boundary-pushing narratives)

it helps that all their editions are stunning!!

please do share any recs :)

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

DriftScribe is interested in reading...

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

Adam Kay

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward.As seen on ITV's Zoe Ball Book Club This edition includes extra diary entries and a new afterword by the author.

DriftScribe wrote a review...

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

DriftScribe

Mar 07, 2026

5.0

Enjoyment: 4.5Quality: 5.0Characters: Plot:

Very Remarkable analysis of how witch-hunting served as an exploitative tool in the primitive accumulation of capitalism. I'd argue that the definition of social reproduction in the book isn't clear enough and might miss some points because it focused too much on procreation. Still, the whole argumentation process is fascinating.

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Actual Air

David Berman

David Berman is a young Virginian poet with a sly, intense regard for the past. He comes on like a prankster, restocking the imperial orations of Wallace Stevens and the byzantine monologues of John Ashbery with the pop- cultural bric-a-brac of a new generation: "I am not cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds." But his words have an easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history, casts a shadow. —The New Yorker David Berman's poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent and funny. They are narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions. They take the familiar and make it new, so new the reader is stunned and will not soon forget. I found much to savor on every page of Actual Air. It's a book for everyone. —James Tate

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Actual Air

David Berman

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DriftScribe

Thoughts from 11%

“… there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers, makes of their narrative a neat reflexive arc in which it was always understood, by the colonized and (this part implied) the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.”

It’s a very insightful critique. Those beautiful anti-colonial stories (often goes like: ppl were oppressed → they bravely stood up → everyone eventually agreed it was wrong ) are so neat and morally wrapped-up that let the colonized be heroic in a very clean, noble way, and it lets the descendants of colonizers picture themselves as having long understood the moral lesson. It’s a story that lets Western audiences feel reflective without ever feeling implicated, while the anti-colonial resistance in real history involved fear, violence, disagreement, and desperation.

So these polished stories, even when they’re meant to honor the oppressed, always end up rewriting the past in a way that makes it easier for Western readers to digest and absorb. And the power to frame the story still sits with the West.

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Quote from 10%

“Real justice would look to restore people and communities, to rebuild trust and social cohesion, to offer people a way forward, to reduce the social forces that drive crime, and to treat both victims and perpetrators as full human beings. Our police and larger criminal justice system not only fail at this but rarely see it as even related to their mission.”

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