The unconventional work is made up of fourteen printed works—cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books—packaged in a boxed set.

Some appeared in Ware's Acme Novelty Library #18 (2007), which itself contained material from The New Yorker, Nest, Kramers Ergot, Chicago Reader, Hangar 21 Magazine, and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

[3] The New York Times Magazine ran a seven-month series from 2005-2006 that was reproduced in the box set in the form of a Little Golden Book.

[8] Ware experiments with the book as printed object in a way similar to the experimental French comics collective Oubapo, paying particular attention to the physical aspects of the individual books—the quality of the paper, binding and page dimensions.

[9] The protagonist of Building Stories is an unnamed woman[10] with brown hair[2] who suffered the loss of the lower half of her left leg in a childhood boating accident.

[11] In the story "Touch Sensitive", people from the future wearing glass helmets peer down on a couple who reside on the building's second floor.

They use a technology that can read fragments of memories from an "area's consciousness cloud" and witness the potential breakup of the couple.

The female protagonist is unable to escape the omnipresence of death in the suburban home in Oak Park, Illinois, where had previously lived—her closest college friend commits suicide, her cat dies, she flushes a baby mouse down the toilet, and she is tormented about what to believe about abortion.

The cutaway interiors of rooms recall the technique used in domestic scenes by 17th-century Dutch painters, as well as the labeled drawings in the children's storybooks of Richard Scarry.

[3] Academic Martha Kuhlman saw Ware's attempt to "document the multiple perspectives" of the project's characters to aspire "to a graphic novel on the scale of James Joyce's Ulysses.

[16] The BookScore gave it an aggregated critic score of 8.9/10 based on an accumulation of British and American press reviews.