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

“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.

BIO

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.

REVIEWS

“A cult classic . . . [A] sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart.” -- Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic

“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

[H]  Farrar, Straus and Giroux  /  April 15, 2025

1.0" H x 8.3" L x 5.6" W (0.8 lbs) 272 pages