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, 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. "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. One can't help but wonder if the contemporary literary landscape might be a little wilder, a little freer, if this book hadn't lain dormant the last forty years. 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 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 was first acquired by Toni Morrison, who was then an editor at Random House, and 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. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publish Date: April 15, 2025 Pages: 272 Dimensions: 5.0 X 7.5 X 1.0 inches | 1.0 pounds Language: English Type: Hardcover EAN/UPC: 9780374608804 BISAC Categories: Literary, African American - General, World Literature - American - 20th Century
