Fish Tales by Nettie Jones is the Sub Rosa selection for May. The discussion will be held on Saturday, May 30 at 6:30pm. Books are in stock and discounted 15%.
“Utterly confident . . . This unsung Morrison-edited novel is one that keeps up with the best of them.”
—Kat Chen, Condé Nast Traveler
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.
Confident and cavalier, Lewis Jones 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.
“A wild romp filled with sex and drugs, pleasure and pain . . . For the right reader, [Fish Tales] will be everything.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Unflinching . . . A meditation on female sexuality and the cost of pursuing freedom.”
—Lindsay Johns, The Times Literary Supplement
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.