The Vivisectors: A Novel

Synopsis

In a decaying university city where nature steadily reclaims the landscape, a reclusive graduate student spends her days quietly managing the career of her manipulative professor. Detached from the turmoil around her, she remains unmoved even as academic scandals erupt and her estranged mother attempts suicide. But when she is ordered to befriend a controversial student at the center of the unrest, her carefully controlled existence begins to unravel, drawing her into an unsettling relationship that forces her to confront the limits of isolation, morality, and desire.

Following her acclaimed debut The Doloriad, Missouri Williams delivers a dark, intellectually ambitious novel that blends gothic atmosphere with psychological precision. Part campus novel, part allegory, and part unconventional love story, The Vivisectors explores power, alienation, and the search for meaning in a fractured world with dazzling originality and razor-sharp prose.

About the Author

Missouri Williams is the author of The Doloriad, winner of the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Believer, The Nation, The Baffler, and The Drift. Celebrated for her singular style and fearless imagination, she has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literary fiction.

Publisher

MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication Date

May 26, 2026

Format

Hardcover

Pages

288

Subjects

Literary Fiction · Campus Novel · Gothic Fiction · Psychological Fiction · Contemporary Fiction

ISBN

9780374619299