APR 28 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Nettie Jones presents Fish Tales:
in conversation with Angela Flournoy, Namwali Serpell and Ayana Mathis
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I'd just like a seat, please - $5
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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.
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.
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Wilderness, which is forthcoming from Mariner Books in September 2025. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University and UCLA.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for Fiction, and was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and most recently, The Unsettled which was the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. The book was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023. Mathis is a 2025-26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2024-25 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.