Uncommon Type

Mr. Hanks turns out to be as authentically genuine a Writer with a capital 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 Reading Tom Hankss Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice Munro is also the greatest actress of our time. -- Ann Patchett All American life is here ... Delightful ... Hankss 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 hes going to write a great novel one day. -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times * On the page, as on screen, Hanks is, simply, a lovely person to be around ... Hanks captures the childs-eye view of the world with pitch-perfect accuracy and as a writing project it nails perhaps the hardest thing of all: a story in which nothing and everything happens. -- Emma Brockes * Guardian * The central quality to Toms writing is a kind of poignant playfulness. Its exactly what you hope from him, except you wish he was sitting in your home, reading it aloud to you, one story at a time. -- Mindy Kaling [Tom Hanks's] first collection of stories reverses the trick, unveiling the inventive mind behind his regular-guy faade ... His characters, like the machines on which he creates them, are idiosyncratic, disconnected from the mainstream ... Theres darkness too: infidelity, war, Hollywood press junkets. Hankss voice is as direct and dry as the one we know from his films ... Hanks has played so many roles. Of course they will have rubbed off, on him and on us. His book reflects that variety. You never know what youre gonna get next. * Sunday Telegraph * It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it. -- Steve Martin 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 fathers infidelity, a motley crew shooting for the moon with such acute empathy and good humour wed follow him anywhere. The cumulative effect is of a world I didnt want to leave. -- Anna Funder The great strengths of this collection are decency and sentimentality. * Sunday Times * 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 It makes perfect sense that his first foray into fiction writing, with the short-story collection Uncommon Type, embodies the same all-American spirit He can write engagingly He has a particular aptitude for writing dialogue, perhaps unsurprisingly, and a wry turn of phrase that blooms at times into rollicking repartee The past comes into play much more powerfully when Hanks asks implicit questions about how America has changed, particularly in the welcome it offers to immigrants These are picaresque characters, enacting stories of friendship and adventure There is life here, and humour, along with evocative moments of reflection on the state of the American dream. It is clear that Hanks is aiming for entertainment and whimsy over any attempt at high literary style. And on those terms, these stories are a hit. * Financial Times * Hanks can write. These pieces, some of which feature recurring characters and many of which explore the classic American short s

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.