Still Lives and Set Pieces is a collection of stories that explore concepts of identity under pressure, using meta-fictional approaches and various formal strategies, such as borrowing structural traits from other styles of composition, to fracture POV and add dimensionality. One tale explodes the few moments immediately following an assisted suicide as the surviving partner starts the slow process of self-redefinition. Another wonders if a composer's search for the right five notes to complete his project has more to it than pitch and rhythm. A third sees two would-be criminals, stuck in time, playing darts in the back room of a nameless pub, while they await word of why they are there and what's to happen to them.

A collection of nonfiction and fiction pieces that seek to address contemporary moral dilemmas, including but not limited to the hapless, the hopeless, and the helpless. A newly divorced man grapples with nature and estrangement, a woman helps her former lover contemplate suicide, a family copes with the aftermath of breast cancer, a woman travels to the dark side of LA where she watches a porn filmed in her boyfriend's childhood home, and a final story that seeks to reclaim Callahan's relationship with her father that was founded in beekeeping but lost to religion. In each story there is a simultaneous desire and anxiety of closeness; in every story the stare into comedy and tragedy remains relentless. While fundamentally upsetting, these stories aim to charm and ruin in equal measure.