Excerpt from Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three Exhausting Weeks

Day 1

Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash – the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater. Before HBO, Netflix, and the one hundred and seven other entertainment outlets bankrupted the Lux, I sat for many hours in that once-splendid cinema palace and watched movies. Now it's stall after stall of what passes for antiques. Anna and I looked into every one of them.

MDash was about to become a naturalized US Citizen, which was as big a deal for us as it was for him. Steve Wong's grandparents were naturalized in the forties. My dad had escaped the low-grade thugs that were East European Communists in the 1970s and, way back when, Anna's ancestors rowed boats across the North Atlantic, seeking to pillage whatever was pillage-able in the New World. The Anna family legend is that they found Martha's Vineyard ...

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Excerpted from Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. Copyright © 2017 by Tom Hanks. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.