What Lies Beneath: Marianne Villanueva’s Residents of the Deep

Some stories demand to be read not for comfort, but for confrontation—for the way they ask us to look closer at the edges of human experience. Marianne Villanueva’s Residents of the Deep (out August 19, 2025) is one such collection.

Here, survival is never simple. In Ice, two men trudge through a frozen wasteland where the only certainty is futility. In Dumaguete, a young boy shoulders an impossible burden as he becomes his mother’s protector. And in the title story, a ship captain finds a city submerged at the ocean floor, a discovery that raises moral questions far heavier than any treasure.

Villanueva’s stories are sharp, precise, and devastatingly clear-eyed. Her characters—vulnerable, battered, but unyielding—reveal the contradictions of human nature: that we can be both fragile and enduring, selfish and selfless, hopeful even in the absence of hope.

Born in the Philippines and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Villanueva has long been celebrated for her ability to bridge cultures and landscapes in her fiction. With Residents of the Deep, she turns her gaze to extremity—where survival itself becomes a moral act.

If you’re ready to dive into a collection that lacerates as much as it illuminates, Residents of the Deep is waiting.