Menomonee Falls native Mike Magnuson is one of our best authors. His two novels, "The Right Man for the Job" and "The Fire Gospels," are smart, funny, well-written Midwestern gothics and his latest, "Lummox: The Evolution of a Man," published by Harper Collins earlier this month, uses Magnuson's own life as a foundation.

We recently caught up with Mags and asked him about "Lummox," the Falls, drumming, the Packers and more.

OMC: Okay, we've read the disclaimer at the back of the book, but we've also seen in the small print at the front that "Lummox" is "fiction." How much should we believe?

MM: You know what? I hadn't noticed that small print till you pointed it out. Fiction? That's news to me. I mean, when I wrote "Lummox" I didn't intend it to be fiction, but obviously some of the stuff in the book is bull, which is to say I have fabricated material here and there in order to provide my readers with a more entertaining reading experience and a more enlightening one, too.

"Lummox" is a dramatized version of real events. It's a work of literature based on real events. This means I constructed the book -- the prose style, the dialogue, the arrangement of details, the story line, and so on -- so that the sum of its parts would obtain metaphoric value. You see what I'm saying?

I want the form of the book to supersede its absolute fidelity to the facts, and this is because I believe form creates metaphor and that metaphor is ultimately more valuable, and occasionally more truthful, than an exact rendering of who said precisely what and when. In any case, if there are factual infelicities in "Lummox," they exist because I've forgotten the real facts or never knew them in the first place. Besides, whatever the real facts are, I'll guarantee you that they're very, very close in substance to what I have presented in the book.

OMC: A lot appears to be made about your experiences with feminists, as detailed in the book. But, to me, this doesn't seem like a major theme of the book. Why do you think people are focusing on that aspect?

MM: The feminist stuff is probably coming from me, to tell the truth. I, Mike Magnuson, believe that "Lummox" is a feminist work. For real. If anything, "Lummox" should prove to feminists that they've been correct about men all along, which information they might find useful in some way.