The Sea Gives Up the Dead
The Sea Gives Up the Dead is the winner of the 2023 Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction, selected by Carmen Maria Machado. It is now out with Red Hen Press, as of April 29th, 2025. It was selected by the American Booksellers Association as a Winter/Spring 2025 Top 10 Debut Book for their Indies Introduce Series and as a May 2025 Indie Next selection, is one of Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025, and one of Ms. Magazine’s Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025.
Order it from Red Hen, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, or your local independent bookstore! You can also get it as an audiobook read by the amazing Heather Kay Ling from Highbridge Audio.
The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a collection of stories sprinkled into the soil of fairy tale, left to take root and grow wild there. A lovesick nanny slays a dragon. The devil tries to save her mother. A girl drowns and becomes a saint. Three kids plot to blow up their dad, a grieving mother sails the sea to find her son’s grave, a scientist brings a voice to life, and a mermaid falls into the power of a witch. Here, historical fiction, horror, and fantasy tangle together in a queer garden of love, grief, and longing.
About the Book
Praise for The Sea Gives Up the Dead
“Stories that affirm the value of truly being alive.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This slim volume contains multitudes.”
—NPR
“Witty, witchy, darkly brilliant, Molly Olguín’s metamorphic tales radiate insight and intelligence, exploding into visions as fresh and surprising as those of Angela Carter or Octavia Butler, Jeanette Winterson or Kirstin Valdez Quade.”
—Andrea Barrett, author of Natural History and Ship Fever
“I could not be more excited by this haunting, lush, genre-leaping collection—reading it, I am reminded of how I felt when I first encountered Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Gorgeously written, imaginative, startling—The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a wunderkammer of beauty and sorrow.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House
Indies Introduce Booksellers Say:
“The Sea Gives Up the Dead offers readers a delectable assortment of fantastical, queer, wildly inventive stories with much to say about the intersections of gender and race. If you’ve been looking for a jewel box of tales a la Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, then this is for you!”
—Austin Carter, Pocket Books Shop, Lancaster, PA
“There is no getting away from death here. However, there’s a subtlety that resonates throughout the wonderfully smooth and lithe prose that makes these tales a joy to read. Absolutely fantastic!”
—Randy Schiller, Left Bank Books, St. Louis, MO
“A fantastical collection of stories that mix the wildness of fairy tales with horror to create otherworldly stories about love, grief, and yearning in a different way. So good!”
—Kim Brock, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Cincinnati, OH
“A mouthwatering ride of interesting twists and explosive characters. The Sea Gives Up The Dead has just the right amount of intrigue to suck you in further with each story you read.”
—Desirae Wilkerson, Paper Boat Booksellers, Seattle, WA
“Molly Olguín won me over pretty much from page one.”
—Universe in Words
“As the stories in The Sea Gives up the Dead explore intimate portrayals of grief and longing, the collection as a whole grapples with what we owe the dead, and what we owe ourselves.”
—West Trade Review
“If you enjoy stories that are eerie and cryptic, you’ll enjoy these.”
—The Book Stop
“Olguín’s wry, lucid, and compassionate prose illuminates the ways death changes us—and challenges us to laugh at the complicated succession of losses that we call life.”
—Strange Horizons
“The consistently excellent stories in this collection present choices between faith and doubt, between taking these fictions to be speculative or perceiving their reality as mundane but full of characters who believe in the impossible. The Sea Gives Up the Dead is both a fascinating exploration of how far a short story can stretch ambiguity and a multi-faceted series of expertly crafted fictions.”
Upcoming Events
Fire, Water, and Other Queer Subjects: The Sea Gives Up the Dead and Self Portrait of Icarus As a Country on Fire
With Jason Schneiderman
Sunday, June 22, 3pm
Bureau of General Services — Queer Division
Room 210, The LGBT Community Center
208 W 13th St, NYC
Horror & Hope: Writing Queer Lit in 2025
With Rebecca Turkewitz and Rylan Hynes
Tuesday July 1st, 7pm
Print: A Bookstore
273 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101