Marina Keegan died in a car crash in 2012, days after graduating from Yale University. Her death lends the work a poignant undercurrent. "We're so young," she writes in the title piece of this collection of essays and stories. "We're 22 years old. We have so much time." Keegan's writing is smart and incisive, particularly when it comes to twentysomethings and technology. "A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts," she writes in Cold Pastoral, about a student dealing with the death of her sort-of boyfriend. The range is impressive – there are stories of doomed submarines and ageing ballerinas – but Keegan shines brightest writing about her own generation, who on their loneliest nights stumble home to their computers "partnerless, tired, awake".
