Thursday December 11, 2025 at 7 PM (FREE admission)
Book Reading and Discussion:
Carl Skoggard reads from his new translation of
Klaus Mann’s VOLCANO: A NOVEL AMONG EMIGRANTS.

The reading will be followed by a Q&A  and is open free to the public.

In “Volcano: A Novel Among Emigrants“, Klaus Mann traces the fortunes of a representative array of Hitler refugees and resisters through the better part of a decade – from 1933 up to shortly before the publication of his novel, in spring of 1939. This is the earliest sustained evocation of the antifascist experience — a recounting of its psychology, of strategies and tactics – and therefore an important literary milestone.

Yet Volcano never stays serious for long; it wants to entertain every bit as much as instruct. The eldest son of Thomas Mann was always obsessed with acting and self promotion, and if the Nazis power grab gave the signal for regime “power shows,” then his writing puts on a rival show of its own. By turns horrific and melodramatic, sinister and cozy, Volcano aims to keep your attention at all costs.(When guardian angels eventually show up, they nearly steal the show.)

As Mann’s exiles, scattered from Los Angeles to Shanghai, coalesce into a far-flung resistance movement, his main characters behave like emanations of the notoriously charged Mann family romance. At the heart of his novel is the father-son dynamic that played out in real life between Klaus and Thomas Mann, and which led to the son’s eventual destruction. Paternity of body and of books: such are the stakes in this extravagant chronicle, translated here for the first time into English.

Skoggard is a is a writer and translator living in Valatie, New York. He has produced annotated English versions of works by Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, and others, including two brilliant novels by Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster and Georg.

Free admission.