Description: In Residents of the Deep, Marianne Villanueva explores human resilience in moments of extremity through a series of gripping stories. In "Ice," two men confront their future in a barren, post-apocalyptic world where survival itself becomes the only meaning: "The point is, there is no point. You just keep going." In Dumaguete, a young boy is forced to protect his mother, a role that threatens to unravel him. The title story follows a ship captain who discovers a submerged city and is thrust into a moral reckoning that challenges his understanding of responsibility. Clear-eyed and unflinching, these stories reveal the raw tenacity and unyielding spirit of humanity, even in the face of profound vulnerability and hardship.
Brief description: Marianne Villanueva was born and raised in the Philippines, received a creative writing fellowship from Stanford University, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first story collection, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila, was a finalist for the Philippines' National Book Award. Her second, Mayor of the Roses, was the inaugural publication of the Miami University Press Fiction Series. Problems with Sleep, her fifth collection, is forthcoming from Betty Books in 2026. She is writing a novel, White Sails, Green Oceans, about a 16th-century Spanish priest who is sent to the Philippines to fight demons.
Review Quotes: "Villanueva has written a book that refuses to stay in one genre or one century or one vocabulary. It morphs. It leaks. It contradicts itself. And that's precisely the point. Residents of the Deep makes you think on the instability of narrative. On how families rewrite themselves, how countries overwrite their pasts, how colonizers translate entire cultures out of existence, and how children inherit this linguistic rubble and try to name their world with it."
Anaïs Godard, CALYX