Heartborn introduces five characters encountering unconventional matters of the heart - a stuffy lesbian holding her late wife's ashes, a graffiti artist painting for a loathsome man, a cynical hipster trapped in a romantic interlude, a blocked writer chasing an ephemeral muse, and a doctor falling for her patient in a dystopian future where homosexuality is outlawed. In her debut collection of short stories, Teresa Huang explores tableaux adjacent to traditional tales of love, stripping away the sentimental to inspect the raw, unpolished truth underneath. Her characters look in on love from the outside, contemplating what it means for them and finding unexpected value within.