"Williams's second novel is as brilliant as it is dark, full of unsettling, revelatory allegory, and frankly unlike anything I've read before." --Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"The Vivisectors tells two stories at once about one person. The suspenseful tension between them pulses at the heart of the novel's poignance, humor, and winning personality . . . The form of the book is an apt mould for its crucial contradictions." --Max Winter, On the Sea Wall

"In the hypnotic sophomore outing from Williams, a professor's personal assistant gets drawn into a strange triangle with her boss and a male student . . . Williams is an accomplished stylist, and her writing accrues a magnetic rhythm, calling to mind Clarice Lispector or Marie Redonnet... It's a singular and arresting work." --Publishers Weekly

"Williams is an heir to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose female protagonists often possess a passivity and an icy detestation of society that teeters on the brink of nihilism... A flinty, withholding novel . . . full of dark intelligence." --Kirkus

"This is the modern rupture -- our crisis of meaning and spiritual malaise shaped into a novel unlike any other. It's part philosophical allegory, part depth psychology, within a cosmos marked by a profound alienation. Missouri Williams writes with a gothic angularity that puts her in a category of one. She swims in deep waters and surfaces now as a major writer for our age." --Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song, winner of the Booker Prize

"The Vivisectors is a novel to marvel at - intricate, utterly precise, unfurling with the same lushness and strange menace of the greenery that creeps over the decaying city of its setting. An original and ingenious work." --Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread and The Water Cure

"As I read The Vivisectors, I thought of the dark strangeness of Bruno Schulz and Shirley Jackson, all while experiencing the singular, unbroken, and extraordinary imagination of Missouri Williams." --Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

"Missouri Williams has paired the remote and mysterious style of the gothic novel with a narrator who you want to know everything about. When she does show her hand it's like a gift--fun, biting, and wise." --Zoe Dubno, author of Happiness and Love

"Missouri Williams's stark, suis generis voice returns with another delightfully grotesque, muddy landscape populated by utterly deranged characters who are perfect in the eyes of a freak like me. The anti-feel good hit of the year." --Fernando A. Flores, author of Brother Brontë and Tears of the Trufflepig

"The Vivisectors is an astonishing novel by an astonishing writer. Playful, digressive, and pulsating with existential energy, Missouri Williams' newest contribution harkens back to the roots of the novel, the realms of boundless freedom that characterise the greatest works of eighteenth century literature, and drags them forth to the contemporary moment. It's exhilarating, transcendent even, and speaks to the deep and profound malaise characterising the modern human experience. I am in awe." --Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

"A wicked and beguiling novel, written with the kind of precision other writers can only dream of." --Amy Twigg, author of Spoilt Creatures