TOM HANKS has been an actor, screenwriter, director and, through Playtone, a producer. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. This is his first collection of fiction.
“It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer
with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it.”
—Steve Martin
“The central quality to Tom’s writing is a kind of poignant
playfulness. It’s exactly what you hope from him, except you wish
he were sitting in your home, reading it aloud to you, one story at
a time.”
—Mindy Kaling
“Wait—Tom Hanks can write, too? Funny, moving, deftly surprising
stories? That's just swell. Maybe there's no crying in baseball,
pal, but it's perfectly acceptable in the book business. That's how
we drown envy.”
—Carl Hiaasen
“Mr. Hanks turns out to be as authentically genuine a Writer with
as capital a W as ever touched a typewriter key. The stories in
UNCOMMON TYPE range from the hilarious to the deeply touching. They
move in period, location and manner, but all demonstrate a joy in
writing, a pleasure in communicating an intensely American sense of
atmosphere, friendship, life and family that is every bit as smart,
engaging and humane as the man himself. All with that extra quality
of keenly observant and sympathetic intelligence that has always
set Tom Hanks apart. I blink, bubble and boggle in amazed
admiration.”
—Stephen Fry
“Uncommon Type is funny, wise, gloriously inventive and humane. Tom
Hanks sees inside people – a wary divorcee, a billionaire trading
desire for disaster, a boy witnessing his father’s infidelity, a
motley crew shooting for the moon – with such acute empathy and
good humour we’d follow him anywhere. The cumulative effect is of a
world I didn’t want to leave.”
—Anna Funder
“Reading Tom Hanks's Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice
Munro is also the greatest actress of our time.”
—Ann Patchett
“Seventeen wide-ranging and whimsical stories—with a typewriter
tucked into each one. Only one of the stories in Hanks' debut
features an actor: it's a sharp satire with priceless insider
details about a handsome dope on a press junket in Europe. The
other 16 span a surprisingly wide spectrum...Hanks can write the
hell out of typing, and his dialogue is excellent, too. Has he read
William Saroyan? He should. While these stories have the
all-American sweetness, humor, and heart we associate with his
screen roles, Hanks writes like a writer, not a movie star.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Uncommon Type offers heartfelt charm along with nostalgia for
sweeter, simpler times — even if they never really were quite so
sweet or simple… Even when Hanks writes about somber subjects like
the durable distress of combat or the high stakes for immigrants
fleeing persecution, he finds a sweet spot.”
—NPR
“Ultimately if you like Tom Hanks — and who doesn’t? — you will
enjoy Uncommon Type.”
—AM New York
“In Uncommon Type, Hanks proves his bona fides as a serious scribe,
producing a collection of 17 short stories so accomplished and
delightful he can rest assured he has a great fallback plan should
that acting thing, you know, not work out… Terrific, Tom.”
—USA Today
“There is often a powerful sense of other lives imagined at a level
that goes deeper than writerly research.”
—The Guardian
“Enjoyable..."The Past Is Important to Us” employs a sharp,
unexpected conclusion to elevate a story of time travel and romance
at the 1939 World’s Fair."
—Publishers Weekly
“They’re all beautifully written and full of heart.”
—Sunday Mirror, The People
“Hanks can write. These pieces, some of which feature recurring
characters and many of which explore the classic American short
story territory of small-town life, have the authentic, worn-in
feel of a favourite pair of jeans.”
—Metro
“The great strengths of this collection are decency and
sentimentality.”
—Sunday Times
“Playful, perceptive and rewarding.”
—Sunday Express
“An entertaining collection.”
—Mail on Sunday
“impressive.”
—The Sun
“There always comes a slight wariness when we discover that someone
who is generally renowned for one thing turns out to be very good
at something else... But what makes Uncommon Type even harder to
dismiss is the silky-smooth momentum and unforced hum that Hanks'
writing glides along with here.”
—Irish Independent
“All American life is here... Delightful... Hanks’s prose is
impressive, with a strong voice and stylistic flair…. so fluent,
convincing and confident that you forget it belongs to Tom Hanks,
movie star. He's just a writer. And he’s going to write a great
novel one day.”
—The Times
“Unveils the inventive mind behind his regular-guy façade”.
—Daily Telegraph
“Tom Hanks is a natural born storyteller… He Belongs to a tradition
of American storytellers that includes Mark Twain or O Henry
although there is a range of work in Uncommon Type that defies such
a catch-all definition.”
—The Herald
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