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Missouri Williams

@missouriwilliams

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the doloriad
the vivisectors (2026)

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Have you picked up @missouriwilliams’ Booker Prize-longlisted novel THE VIVISECTORS yet? 🖤

‘Genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told’ BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES 2026

‘Left me awestruck by its terrifying beauty’ HANNAH MURRAY, author of The Make-Believe

‘While there are echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh, Williams has a vision and energy all her own’ GUARDIAN

The acclaimed author of The Doloriad returns with a darkly beautiful novel following a reclusive graduate in a campus love story like no other.

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal erupts: Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination.

As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe’s boss instructs her to gather information by befriending Adam. Agathe soon finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?

Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era and a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.

#TheVivisectors #MissouriWilliams #4thEstateBooks by @missouriwilliams

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a month ago

I really loved having this conversation with @jessi.jstevens

https://jjezewskastevens.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-missouri-williams by @missouriwilliams

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a month ago

Author of The Doloriad @missouriwilliams talks to Worms’ @caitlin_mcloughlin_ for Worms 12 about her new and recently longlisted Booker Prize book, ‘The Vivisectors’; the problems of cruelty, skepticism, over-reading, and truth as an emergent quality 📐

Not offering any neat moralising conclusion, The Vivisectors is a testament to what fiction can do, as a space for testing ideas, probing discomfort, and challenging the reader to navigate their own way through complex and conflicting ideas and beliefs.

❤️🪿 Read the full feature in Worms 12, available at the link in our bio🪿❤️ by @missouriwilliams

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2 months ago

gonna miss this free stuff shelf by @missouriwilliams

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3 months ago

1k

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3 months ago

From Kismet 005: Explore the possibility of a glimmering, ideal world in Missouri Williams’s short story, “The Excluded Billionaire.”

Gardens, dolphins, and looping conversations abound in this story, with creeping vines that are narrative tendrils reaching out to Missouri’s story in Kismet 001, “A Perfect Object Lesson” and her novel “The Vivisectors,” published this spring with FSG. Indeed, this imperfectly tessellated fictional world—more Bolaño than Balzac—resembles nothing more than a sprawling, tumbledown estate, not in the middle of nowhere but at the edge of a once-great city. Get lost in it?

Read the full story via the link in bio.

“Let me tell you about a city, an ideal city. It’s not the one you’re imagining, the one from Plato, but another city entirely, the real ideal city. The real ideal city looks like this: imagine a great glass dome, a dome that extends for hundreds of miles, with a ceiling so high that it is indistinguishable from the sky above, and a shining city beneath it. Imagine a golden municipal tower. Imagine fields and green gardens, and four-storied townhouses arranged around squares full of flowers. This is the city I’m talking about.”

— Missouri Williams @missouriwilliams by @missouriwilliams

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3 months ago

six months 🎉🎉🎉🎉 by @missouriwilliams

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4 months ago

wrote a triptych for the @parisreview, thank you @dianadiagram by @missouriwilliams

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4 months ago

what are you going to do with it anyhow by @missouriwilliams

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4 months ago

my book is out in the U.K. today and the USA on Tuesday, thank you so much to everyone at @fsgbooks, @mcdbooks and @4thestatebooks who made this happen, @kishani and @jaxonhoward for their insight and excellence, and my brilliant agent @john.s.ash for always going above and beyond, the Doloriad would never have been published without you and none of this would have happened by @missouriwilliams

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5 months ago

this arrived today! congratulations to @pollybukuro for her beautiful translation and @daniellas for making it all happen

you can order the book here: https://anothergazejournal.bigcartel.com/ by @missouriwilliams

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7 months ago

I have a story in the new issue of Granta that’s free to read online (along with the rest of the issue!) until Monday

https://granta.com/her-enemys-phrase/

thank you @brodiecrellin and @granta_magazine! by @missouriwilliams

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8 months ago