Fish Tales

A Novel

By: Nettie Jones

Narrated by: Dara Brown

A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review - Time - The Week - Literary Hub - The Millions

“A masterpiece.”—Namwali Serpell, The New York Review of Books

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 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, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales offers a glittering, devastating portrait of a woman’s pursuit of her own kind of freedom. As provocative as it is moving, as profane as it is artful, it 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.

©1983, 2025 by Nettie Jones. (P)2025 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“[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

“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

Not my cup of tea

Too much sex for me. It was different from anything I've ever read but different isn't always good.