Manchester minds

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific.

In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous histories, and humanity. Many of his works address historical traumas, such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War, global environmental disharmony, and targeted racial violence, and focus on major figures, including Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, and Anne Frank. This innovative book demonstrates that Lokumbe’s musical compositions, created in collaboration with his ancestors, are multisensorial spiritual soundscapes that aspire to chronicle, heal, and liberate.

This is a captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe. The cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen draws on several years of close conversations with Lokumbe, as well as his journals, to provide a powerful collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. The authors explore Lokumbe’s creative journeys and the spiritual dimensions of his art. They trace Lokumbe’s entire career, from his early years in the Texas and New York City jazz scenes to his widely acclaimed orchestral compositions. The book also addresses Lokumbe’s work in prisons and schools with the Music Liberation Orchestra, founded in the 1970s. Illuminating his philosophies of music, spirituality, justice, and freedom, this book immerses readers in Lokumbe’s many revelatory worlds.

Seeking to escape captivity, Lakshmi the temple elephant sets out on a stirring journey toward freedom. On her way, she briefly experiences life as a film star and encounters a colorful cast including a three-legged dog named Tripod Dog Baba, other elephants in the Bandipur Forest, a chameleon facing an existential crisis, a moon who dances with an elephant, and a flying fish called Alphonse.

Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a remarkable Indian Francophone novel set in Pondicherry, the former capital of French India. Blending philosophical meditations, retellings of Sanskrit mythology, and social critique, Ari Gautier tells the story of Lakshmi’s attempt to escape her fate. From the point of view of animals, the novel explores concepts of destiny, freedom, and identity. It illuminates the paradoxes of animal-human relations in India, where animals are both abused and worshiped, and provides an imaginative critique of the caste system. Gautier’s vivid portrait of Pondicherry brings to life the religious, cultural, culinary, and visual diversity of the city’s districts and sheds light on the little-known history of French colonialism in India. An afterword explores issues such as reincarnation and Indian translation traditions in relation to the novel. At once tragic and comic, satirical and surreal, Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a surprising, compelling, and moving novel from a gifted storyteller.