Fish Tales

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.