This May, Scribner will publish a new edition of the beloved book by Marina Keegan, featuring a foreword from bestselling author R.F. Kuang and additional materials, including one of Marina’s final essays and a selection from her performance poetry.

It has been more than a decade since the initial release of the award-winning posthumous collection of essays and short stories, Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness, that took the world by storm. Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play ready to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car accident.

As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief,  joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. 

“Sparks of light in the darkness is the only way to describe the experience of hearing  from people all over the world in the days after my daughter Marina’s death.  Our grieving family was overwhelmed by an outpouring from readers telling us about the impact of her words on their lives. Remarkably, these testimonials have not stopped coming our way. It is abundantly clear that Marina’s spirit continues to resonate out into the universe and into our hearts.”-- Tracy, Marina’s Mother

 Originally published in 2014, this poignant collection of Keegan’s writings continues to resonate with readers of all ages around the world. Hundreds of thousands of readers have responded to her work on social media . Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina’s essays and stories that articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world. Marina’s words have the power to awaken a sense of hope and possibility in readers—a gift that feels more vital than ever in the face of a global epidemic of loneliness.