Fish Tales: A Novel

by Nettie Jones

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

First published in 1984, the world has finally caught up with the spunk of Lewis Jones, the brilliantly chaotic female protagonist on a pleasure quest. Exploring race, sexuality and desire in 1970s New York and Detroit, this reissued classic lives up to its promise.

A New York Times Book Review Most Anticipated Book of the Spring

A Time Best Book of the Month

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A Must-Read: The Atlantic and The Week

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374608804
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Nettie Jones is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Award, a Yaddo Foundation fellowship, a Michigan Council for the Arts grant, a New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study Student Choice Award, and a Carnegie Fund for Authors grant. Fish Tales, her debut novel, was first acquired by Toni Morrison, who was then an editor at Random House, and it was originally published in 1984. The New York Times named Jones a promising new novelist in 1985. Her second novel, Mischief Makers, was published in 1989. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Editorial Reviews

A party-girl novel like I’d never read before—funny in such a particular register, and so unbelievably full of violence, tenderness, drugs, group sex, exploitation, genuine eroticism, fumbling toward freedom, and some sort of love.”

—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“Breathtaking and brutal, disorienting and delightful . . . A masterpiece.”

—Namwali Serpell, The New York Review of Books

“[A] master writer . . . [Fish Tales is] precise and nimble, with some of the best descriptions of sex ever put to the page.”

—Kaitlyn Greenidge, Harper’s Bazaar

“An audacious novelist, ahead of her time.”

—Alexandra Alter, The New York Times

“A forgotten erotic novel of raw longing and fierce freedom . . . [Fish Tales] simply moves from moment to moment, from obstacle to pleasure and back again. The way human beings, Black, female, and everything else, actually live.”

—Danielle A. Jackson, The Paris Review

“[A] classic novel of debauchery, entrapment, and escape . . . Still pioneering decades after its first run, [Fish Tales] slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas . . . Transgressive to the point of exhilarating.”

—Harmony Holiday, Bookforum

“I loved [Fish Tales] . . . Fantastic.”

—Issac Fitzgerald, The Today Show

“Fish Tales is a burst of authentic energy, a rush of life from start to finish . . . A unique adventure, unafraid to display the grittiness and brutal ecstasy of a life of fast liaisons.”

—Philip Janowski, Chicago Review of Books

“Legitimately shocking, sentence by rat-a-tat sentence, a thrill.”

—Sam Sifton, The New York Times

“Raw and unvarnished . . . [A] sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart.”

—Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic

“Utterly confident in its experimentation and the space it occupies, this unsung Morrison-edited novel is one that keeps up with the best of them.”

—Kat Chen, Condé Nast Traveler

“Incredible . . . A spiky, forgotten jewel of a book.”

—Brittany Allen, Literary Hub

“Fish Tales . . . feels just as edgy as it did when it was first released . . . [A] cult classic.”

—Shannon Carlin, Time

“A wild romp filled with sex and drugs, pleasure and pain . . . For the right reader, [Fish Tales] will be everything.”

—Nancy Kricorian, The Boston Globe

“A novel of desire, pleasure, drugs and sex . . . We’ll all be better for it having been rediscovered.”

—Emily Firetog, Literary Hub

“Fish Tales is a fast, fearless book, told in snatches, and so full of life it practically vibrates in your hands. The fashion, the rollicking orgies, the sex, the coke, the bubbles, the queens, the most head-spinning combination of tenderness and toxicity—it ought to have been the sensation of its time. Thank heavens for the revival of Fish Tales; thank heavens for the fierce vision of Nettie Jones.”

—Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

“Fish Tales is candid, fast, and alive. Nettie Jones renders everything as its own particular organism—cities, relationships, and of course the body and its grotesque eroticism.”

—Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“Fish Tales is wondrous and outrageous, real and incandescent and alive. A genuine treasure.”

—Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

“Nettie Jones writes about sex, yearning, money, and friendship like nobody’s business. So much truth, hurt, and humor permeate this slim, enthralling novel, such that many of Jones’s observations about the nature of power and desire feel written for today. Fish Tales will certainly dazzle you, and it might even scandalize you, but it never tells a lie.”

—Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

From the Publisher