Named a must-read Southern book of the summer by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Deep South Magazine Summer Reading List selection 

“This novel is quite unlike anything I’ve read: transportive, lyrical, inventive, and socially engaged. The Curators marks Maggie Nye as an exciting new voice in fiction.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Complex, brilliant, and original . . . In The Curators, everything is slippery. Other people determine who you are and what you do and what you mean, even when you don’t agree or want them to. The people, places, things, and ideas you get close to change you, and you change them, too.” —Strange Horizons

“A lyrical exploration of both myth and the mob mentality that endangers us all.” —Southern Review of Books

“Nye’s narrative poetically and darkly conveys the uncertainties and anxieties experienced by the girls as they mature to womanhood while struggling to understand the horrific circumstances of Phagan’s murder and Frank’s lynching. Part Southern Gothic, part Frankenstein, all thought-provoking.” —Kirkus

“[The Curators] follows no formula. I love that this is the story of an obsession and where it takes these girls. It's also a story of adolescent friendships, specifically friendships between young girls. A concise, compelling, really emotionally wrought story that I think is worth reading.” —Peter Biello, Georgia Public Broadcasting

“Nye’s novel boldly and authentically looks at desire, hunger, and friendship. It’s the kind of book that you don’t soon forget.” —Southern Literary Review

“Nye’s meticulous attention to detail and sensitivity to the bigotry [Frank] endured provides both Frank and Mary Phagan with a dignity they did not receive in their own time . . . The addition of magic in the form of the golem lifts The Curators out of the archives and into the world, delivering a three-dimensional rendering of a time and place that quoted sources simply can’t. The golem is muddy, messy, and unpredictable, much like history itself.” —Five South

“A tale of obsession within the collective, The Curators is a fearful, splendid debut that is both eerie and elegant in its telling.”—Justin Torres, winner of the National Book Award

“The Curators is astonishingly self-assured, and not only for a debut novel; I can’t recall a historical fiction I have enjoyed or admired more in recent years. Just as the novel’s protagonists seek to narrate their own lives on their own terms, so does the novel take historical facts and make them into the best—and truest—kinds of fictions, proving by example just how more “true” a novel can be than a piece of journalism or a historical record. Indeed, it made me think of how necessary fiction is in this regard; there are things only fiction can say about the past, and about the present, and I’m thankful to Nye reminding me of this.” —Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion