In the slapstick tradition of A Confederacy of Dunces comes Lummox -- part farce, part treatise on what it mean to be a man in America, part true-life tale of a twenty-something man stumbling through the Reagan years, all of it funny in a way that will warm your heart.The lummox is Mike Magnuson, your friendly neighborhood big guy with a foul mouth, a spare tire around his midsection, and a tender heart, and these are his years working in factories, hanging out in taverns, befriending reprobates, going to college, having troubles with the law, and living with crazy jazz musicians and with lesbian separatists. When a mysterious phantom enters his life, he sets himself on a quest to discover the true meaning of lummoxness, and what he learns along the way is both shocking and hilarious.Written with honesty and selfeffacing wry humor, Lummox is an exceptional story of manhood at a time of its redefinition, a book that will leave you laughing out loud in recognition and cheering for lummoxes everywhere.
| ||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Mike Magnuson's Lummox: The Evolution of a Man is a highly entertaining memoir of a bright twentysomething guy floating through life in small-town Wisconsin. The character Mike Magnuson (the book is written in the third person) sees light at the end of the tunnel but is in no hurry to get there. And why not? He has no worries so long as he has a job, beer, drinking buddies, and women to help pass the time. Magnuson climbs the dwelling-space ladder (if only a few rungs) from living at home, to crashing in a closed school's music room that he rents to practice drumming (but mostly holds parties for underage girls), to renting a basement space from the main lesbian power base at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, to shacking up with a long-term girlfriend. In addition to changes in his living situation, Magnuson changes menial jobs, friends, and--after an amusing incident lands him in jail for a holiday weekend--his philosophy and outlook on life, at least for a short while. Magnuson writes an easygoing memoir with wit, hilarity, a liberal dose of scatology, and self-deprecation that never turns to self-pity. You can't help but like this Lummox. --Michael Ferch
From Publishers Weekly
This quirky, charming memoir of a young guy trying to find himself and figure out his place in the world during the Reagan years is both enlightening and entertaining, without ever resorting to the sentimental or the sensational. Magnuson (The Right Man for the Job), who teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, has taken the bold step of writing his memoir from a third-person point of view, and presents readers with a completely convincing (and unflattering) portrait of himself as a crude, vulgar, confused and mostly unlikable heterosexual guy, "guided in life by his dick." His father was a school superintendent, his mother taught him about classical music and his intelligence was high. Even so, Magnuson left home and lived illegally in a closed school building, played the drums, drifted between jobs, drank far too much and coasted in consecutive sexual relationships because it was easy. Magnuson paints a credible characterization of male aimlessness and convinces readers that Mike is sincere even in the height of his obnoxiousness he truly thinks that farting loudly will impress his pick-up from the night before. At times Magnuson is so determined to prove Mike's lummoxness that one may have trouble imagining that this is the man who grew up to write this memoir. There are moments of unusual insight Mike spent a summer living in a lesbian collective, which taught him much about relating to women and ultimately Magnuson brings readers beneath the gross, frightened surface of his younger self to show a depth and vulnerability that is both touching and vibrant. (On-sale Feb. 5)Forecast: If Magnuson is as captivating in person as he is in print, the marketing campaign (which includes national broadcast interviews, a national radio campaign and author appearances in the Midwest) will help his book get off its fat a** and into buyers' hands.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lummox is Blurb-tastic!,
By Scoliosis Ephemera (Embarrass, Minn.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lummox: The Evolution of a Man (Hardcover)
One word: Lummox. One more: Sincerity. Attention Amazon shoppers, talent has struck. This "Lummox" hangs in the mind as only the best literature does: Magnuson's world is a deep wood with wildlife in it. Put your money down and buy this book! Help!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All The World Loves a Lummox,
This review is from: Lummox: The Evolution of a Man (Hardcover)
No work in fiction today better personifies the aimlessness for those few unbuttoned-down men of the 1980's than the beer-slopped story of Mike Magnuson's early life. Told with the bipolar relish of the third person, the book leads from one gutbusting failure to another, until finally, on a happy note, Mike ends up in jail for the weekend for attempting to steal "the hand of God". For once, the beer and weed flush from his system, and he is able to structure a lucid plan to do something great when he finds a beat-up paperback of Rollerball in the cellblock. Like JohnBoy Walton, Mike decides to become a writer. Of course, life is never so simple. With profanity and defecation emitting at every turn of phrase, Mike's story is the path many a man would take if not for the restraints of religion, sobriety, commonsense good judgment, or a capable woman holding a paramount place in their lives. You just know the next "opportunity" will lead to greater heartache, hangover and intestinal blithering; but Mike presses on with his brilliance in the background and his dead-end job at the forefront of his greasy shirt. Mike's Lummox is the guy of Dave Barry, the guy who pops in when the bottlecap twists off and the potato chip bag is opened, the guy who had no war to fight but would have wanted to join the VFW for pitcher night anyway, the guy who changes his own oil on his gravel driveway and fills his deertag every year, the guy who would sell his drums before borrowing a few bucks, and the guy who spouts Shakespeare and airdrums at the bar when the music is fast, the air is blue, and the company is 'Oh so perfect'. He is the guy of Drew Carey, the guy your dad talked about from the nightshift, and the guy George W. shouldn't want to meet, again. Yes, in person and in his book, he is that guy. And his profanity-ridden story is a must for anyone who thinks they know anything about the 80's, factories or what it means to be a selfish clod in search of the good times. Read it, because you want to, not because somebody says you have to.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Don't judge a book by its cover,
By
This review is from: Lummox: The Evolution of a Man (Hardcover)
In fairness to Magnusson, I picked this up at a store that specializes in remainders and doesn't always have very clear organization. It was in the fiction section, and I was expecting a novel. Yes, endorsement copy on the dust jacket uses the world 'memoir,' but given the rest of the packaging, and the section of the store, my mind glossed over this detail.
Since the author writes of himself in the third person, at first it's curious that he'd cast a character with his own name, and I was well into it when I realzied the intent was a memoir (albeit with some fictionalizaton and composite characters for the sake of pace and to protect the innocent). The jacket copy, comparing it to 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and David Sedaris is unfair. It sets up an unrealistically high expectation in the reader, to my mind. What this reminded me of is Chris Offut's 'The Same River Twice,' which is not an unflattering comparison. And 'Lummox' does the two things I think good writing has to do, make you laugh and break your heart. At a couple of points I was ready to put it down and would come to a point that was hilarious, or a moment of unbelievable tragedy. And a lot of the details that Magnusson has of his childhood (he's a few years older than me, but I grew up in essentially the same environment), are very well chosen. Husky jeans, for instance, which I hadn't thought about for twenty-five years, were such a pure stigma when I went through grade school, just telling us he wore them tells 50 pages worth of childhood trauma. I had a gradeschool chum who wore Huskies, and the only thing that could have been worse would be if K-Mart had sold a 'Kick Me' line of clothing. Some of the confessions made fall under Gordon Lisch's rule of writing about the worst thing you've ever done. That's probably the best thing about 'Lummox,' we've all done things we shouldn't have, often with terrible consquence, but not all of us will confess it after a pitcher of beer, much less in print. But if the cover of the book is misleading, maybe that's part of the point. What ultimately emerges is a portrait of a guy who might project an image being uneducated, lethargic, and insensitive -- an image covering someone who is well educated, an avid cyclist, and has, as Magnusson describes it, 'the heart of a pussy.'
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
