The Moving of the Water

Stories anchored in the Welsh American immigrant experience.

Stories anchored in the Welsh American immigrant experience.

Anchored in the community of first-, second-, and third-generation Welsh Americans in Utica, New York, during the 1960s, the stories in David Lloyd's The Moving of the Water delve into universal concerns: identity, home, religion, language, culture, belonging, personal and national histories, mortality. Unflinching in their portrayal of the traumas and conflicts of fictional Welsh Americans, these stories also embrace multiple communities and diverse experiences in linked, innovative narratives: soldiers fighting in World War I and in Vietnam, the criminal underworld, the poignant struggles of children and adults caught between old and new worlds. The complexly damaged characters of these surprising and affecting stories seek transformation and revelation, healing and regeneration: a sometimes traumatic "moving of the water."

David Lloyd is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College. His previous books include the novel Over the Line, the short-story collection Boys: Stories and a Novella, and the poetry collections Warriors, The Gospel According to Frank, and The Everyday Apocalypse. He lives in upstate New York.

David Lloyd is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College. His previous books include the novel Over the Line, the short-story collection Boys: Stories and a Novella, and the poetry collections Warriors, The Gospel According to Frank, and The Everyday Apocalypse. He lives in upstate New York.

"Every Welsh American should own a copy of this book … These tales combine pathos, humour, drama and insightful observation in an anthology which is at once masterful, entertaining and illuminating." — AmeriCymru

"Entertaining, thought-provoking, original, and inherently fascinating…" — Midwest Book Review

"This collection of stories has a great-grandfather: Joyce's Dubliners. Like Joyce's, Lloyd's stories are in the realist mode, yet sometimes broken up with startling, dream-like, hallucinatory passages that are decisive in opening up another range of experience. The final title story is magnificent, no other word will do, and it recalls 'The Dead,' the concluding story of Joyce's book. If Joyce were from Utica, New York, as Lloyd is, he'd have written this book and called it Uticans." — Frank Lentricchia, author of The Music of the Inferno

"A unique collection of stories that are sometimes puzzling, sometimes moving, sometimes enigmatic, and sometimes crystal clear, but always profoundly interesting." — Jan Morris, author of A Writer's House in Wales