Fish Tales

A New York Times Book Review Most-Anticipated Book of Spring
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

＂Nettie Jones’s voice is astonishing. It leaps off the page like a panther . . . Unlike anything I’ve ever read.＂ --Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

A mesmerizing spin through the high-rolling high times of 1970s New York and Detroit, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales is a lost classic taking its rightful place in the spotlight.

Lewis Jones is a party girl for the ages. Confident and cavalier, she seeks freedom and a good time, leaving mayhem in her wake. Strutting between the bohemian demimonde of New York City and the affluent Black community of Detroit, she is supported in her adventures by her husband, Woody, and accompanied by her friend Kitty-Kat, a gay hustler with impeccable style and a knack for finding all the best spots. She guzzles champagne, snorts piles of cocaine, wakes up on silk sheets with a variety of lovers. And then she is upended by the handsome, erudite, often cruel Brook--a man who has his own bevy of admirers. Soon, Lewis and Brook are ensnared in a struggle for dominance that launches them into a shock of violence.

A bold exploration of the blurred line between love and control, pleasure and addiction, Fish Tales offers a glittering, devastating portrait of a woman’s pursuit of her own kind of freedom. It is a striking deluge of longing, anxiety, ego, identity, and love. As provocative as it is moving, as profane as it is artful, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales illuminates the warring forces of power, desire, intimacy, and fear, and exposes the raw nerve of our yearning to be loved on our own terms.

Nettie Jones is the author of Fish Tales, which was acquired by Toni Morrison and published by Random House in 1984. Her second novel, Mischief Makers, was published in 1989. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Jones was named a New York Times Promising New Novelist in 1985. She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Award, a Yaddo Foundation Award, a Michigan Council of the Arts Award, a New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study Student’s Choice Award, a Carnegie Fund for Authors Award, and a PEN America Freedom to Write Award.