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 Hanks’s 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 ... 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. -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *
On the page, as on screen, Hanks is, simply, a lovely person to be around ... Hanks captures the child’s-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 Tom’s writing is a kind of poignant playfulness. It’s 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 façade ... His characters, like the machines on which he creates them, are idiosyncratic, disconnected from the mainstream ... There’s darkness too: infidelity, war, Hollywood press junkets. Hanks’s 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 you’re 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 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
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