| Description | A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025 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.
===
THE DAZZLING LOST CLASSIC *A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025* Acquired by Toni Morrison, championed by Gayl Jones, and almost forgotten for forty years, FISH TALES is a fierce, fearless modern classic for our own fragmented times. *** 'Candid, fast and alive' RAVEN LEILANI 'Fast, fearless, so full of life it practically vibrates in your hands' JUSTIN TORRES 'Wondrous and outrageous, real and incandescent and alive' BRYAN WASHINGTON 'Fish Tales will certainly dazzle you, and it might even scandalize you, but it never tells a lie' ANGELA FLOURNOY' A novel of desire, pleasure, drugs and sex . . . We'll all be better for it having been rediscovered' LITERARY HUB Lewis Jones is a party girl on the edge. Bankrolled by her husband Woody and accompanied by her fellow hedonist Kitty Kat, a hustler who knows all the best spots, Lewis bounces between the demimonde of 70s New York and affluent Black Detroit in a fractured haze of lovers, cocaine parties and champagne baths. But her wild pursuit of freedom is upended when she meets the handsome, erudite, cruel Brook - the only man who won't allow her to take control. A kaleidoscopic swirl of sex and exploitation, selfhood and self-destruction, this lost classic is an unnervingly contemporary depiction of the collision between identity, freedom and female desire - perfect for fans of In the Cut, Oreo, Luster and I'm a Fan.
===
A woman named Lewis Jones bounces back and forth between Detroit and New York, using and being used by a menagerie of cocaine-sniffing, sexually outrageous, and despair-ridden men and women
===
Ein furchtloses Debüt, das in den 1980er Jahren von Toni Morrison entdeckt wurde. Was genau ist an einer (Schwarzen) Frau, die ihrem Verlangen nachgeht, so provokant? Die 32-jährige Lewis wirft sich in das Nachtleben von Downtown Manhattan und Detroit. Sie trinkt Sekt aus Silberkelchen und wacht mit wechselnden Liebhabern zwischen Seidenlaken auf. Bis sie den gut aussehenden Brook kennenlernt und die Kontrolle zu verlieren droht. Jetzt geht es nicht mehr um ein Partygirl, das sich die Nase mit Koks pudert, sondern um Macht und erotisches Begehren, um Gewalt und Lust und immer auch um die Selbstbehauptung einer Frau, die ihren Freiheitsanspruch mit einer ungekannten Selbstverständlichkeit gegen Zuschreibungen und Erwartungshaltungen verteidigt. Es ist ein Roman wie ein wilder Strudel aus Vergnügen, Drogen und Sex, eine kühne Erkundung der verschwommenen Räume, in denen wir leben: zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Ausbeutung, Kunst und Profanem, Vernunft und Selbstzerstörung, Autonomie und Intimität. »Wir können gar nicht dankbar genug sein für die Wiederentdeckung von Fish Tales, für die kämpferische Vision von Nettie Jones.« Justin Torres, National Book Award 2023.
===
The peaceful community of sea creatures on a coral reef is disrupted when bullying barracudas arrive. |
|---|
