Thanks to its effortless command of time and place (specifically, Depression-era North Carolina), Tony Earley's Jim The Boy became one of last year's standout debut novels. The book's prose style is as removed from contemporary trends as its storyline, while the careful simplicity of Earley's writing suggests a previous era. The same approach can be found in his new non-fiction collection, Somehow Form A Family, where it proves just as adept at handling the present and the personal as it did at detailing a fictional past. In the eponymous piece, Earley recalls his childhood, as filtered through the blue glow of a television constantly in use. The easy ironies of contrasting his family's problems to the idealized units on television never seem to occur to him; Earley instead opts for a serious consideration of television's ability to distort perceptions and expectations, culminating when, during a crisis, he spots The Brady Bunch's Ann B. Davis in a college cafeteria. This ability to find far-reaching significance in individual details pervades Somehow, as Earley explores trivia like the role of a single hallway in the lives of several generations of his family, or the far-reaching effects of a single, mild rebuke from his father during a hunting trip. While Earley is a fine miniature memoirist, Somehow's later pieces reveal him as an equally memorable—and equally sharp—personal journalist. "Ghost Stories" sends him to New Orleans, wife in tow, in search of ghosts. The quest allows him, almost inescapably, to find humor in a cottage industry of one of America's most haunted cities, but it also serves as a jumping-off point for a consideration of faith and the death of his teenage sister. Even given the broadest of targets, such as a Coors-sponsored trip aboard the Concorde, Earley balances the humor of his time in a cramped space with Kyle Petty (a voracious reader), an Apollo 10 astronaut, marketing goons, and a contest-winning bounty hunter with the deeply considered thoughtfulness that makes him such a welcome voice in any field.