Fish Tales: A Novel
by Nettie Jones

“Fish Tales is wondrous and outrageous, real and incandescent and alive. A novel unlike any other, from an author unlike any other: Nettie Jones astounds and shocks and comforts. Fish Tales is a genuine treasure.”
—Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

“Nettie Jones writes about sex, desire, money, and friendship like nobody’s business. So much truth, hurt, and humor permeate throughout 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

This lost classic takes a mesmerizing spin through the high-rolling high times of 1970s New York and Detroit.

Zooming between the bohemian demimonde of New York and the affluent Black community of Detroit in the 1970s, Lewis Jones is a party girl for the ages—a woman in her thirties who has reached a point of freedom, confidence, and mayhem. She is supported in her adventures, in every way, by her husband, Woody. She is accompanied by her friend Kitty Kat, a gay hustler with impeccable style and a knack for finding all the best spots. She soaks in baths of champagne, powders her nose with cocaine, and wakes up on silk sheets with a variety of lovers. And then she is finally, truly upended by the handsome, erudite, often cruel Brook—a man who won’t tolerate her attempts to take control.

A wild swirl of desire, pleasure, power, drugs, and sex, Nettie Jones's Fish Tales is a bold exploration of the blurred spaces we inhabit—sexuality and race, agency and exploitation, selfhood and intimacy, sanity and self-destruction, art and the profane. As action-packed as it is brief, Fish Tales is a collage, a time capsule, a snapshot, a message. And it is strikingly, unnervingly current in its deluge of desire on top of anxiety, on top of ego and identity, on top of freedom, on top of love.