Lest you forgot, typewriter fanatic Tom Hanks has been working on a short story collection that features typewriters for a couple of years now. Today, Entertainment Weekly reported that that book, which is being published by Alfred A. Knopf, is titled Uncommon Type: Some Stories. You know, because of the whole typewriter thing. As Hanks has long maintained, the machines themselves are ancillary to the stories, and, according to EW, the characters he has created include:
…a man immigrating to New York City after fleeing a civil war in his country; a person who becomes an ESPN star after bowling a string of perfect games; a billionaire and his assistant on a “hunt for something larger”; and an actor enduring a life of press junkets.
That last one seems like it could verge into memoir territory. In an accompanying interview, Hanks also acknowledged that he mainly wrote the book on a laptop. We were going to fault him for lack of dedication to his theme, but then he explained: “Typewriters are for personal letters, for musings, for rambling stream-of-consciousness stamped-in-paper doodling.”