Liam Williams is heading to college, and eagerly anticipates his coming independence. But for his poet mother, Cathleen, and his lawyer father, Noah, Liam's going is anything but easy. Each projects their lost dreams of youth onto their only child, and when Cathleen leaves Noah alone upstate to drive Liam down through New York's Hudson Valley to his school, their separation becomes quite literally a moving story of learning how to come to grips with losing . . . without letting go.

"Michael Joyce has written a stunning novel of the deeply perplexing paradox of love. Liam's Going begins as a simple story, a young man being driven to college, and unfolds into a mythic grandness. It reminded me of the best of James Salter and John Updike, as well as Faulkner and the other Joyce, beautifully wrought into something tender and serious and original." — David Means, author of A Quick Kiss of Redemption: And Other Stories

"This new novel isn't merely steeped in Hudson River Valley lore, it positively radiates with knowledge of and affection for the area. . . . In addition to being an eloquent meditation on memory and passion, [Liam's Going] is a sort of poets' guide to the area between Peeksill and Albany. . . . The attentive reader is guaranteed several worthwhile epiphanies per chapter." — ForeWord Magazine

"Constructed much like a poem, this novel's lines of dialogue, details, and descriptive phrases appear and reappear to revelatory effect; its narrative jumps between present, past, and beyond convince us that the present is only a thin netting tossed over the past. ...The book's musical language is at times as gorgeous as Cheever or early Updike..." — Publishers Weekly

Hélène Cixous once wrote that “Michael Joyce is a subliminal explorer—he sets off to explore mental regions that are generally neglected, as if they were forests or deserted islands. ... This is the secret of great poetical writing.” Mr. Joyce's first novel, The War Outside Ireland, received the Great Lakes New Writers Award, and was described by John Hawkes as “a tall tale, a family history, [and] a lyric meditation on the holy temper of the Irish mind...” The New York Times called his digital novel, afternoon, a story, “the granddaddy of hypertext fictions.” His seventeen print books include seven novels, most recently Media: a picaresque; three books of poems, A Hagiography of Heaven and Vicinity, Biennial, and Paris Views; a mixed collection of media essays and short fiction from State University of New York Press, and two influential collections of essays on digital media from University of Michigan Press. He is Professor Emeritus of English and Media Studies at Vassar College and lives along the Hudson River.