Rosemary Mahoney
Whoredom in Kimmage; The World of Irish Women
A New York Times Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Written with the art of a skilled fiction writer whose ear for Irish bluster is pitch-perfect, Whoredom in Kimmage tells the tale of contemporary Irish women through a series of brilliantly animated scenes that take the reader from Dillon's tiny pub in rural Corofin to the heart of Dublin.
Praise for Whoredom in Kimmage:
"Mahoney is brilliant at reacreating the cast of a face, the cadence of a line, the particular smell of a room. She is a realist and a miniaturist, and one of the pleasures of reading her comes from watching her show how each small detail, no bigger than the shape of a crooked, broken-toothed smile, fits into the bigger canvas of Irish life. It's a serious feat to put a living, breathing Irish bar between the covers of a book--and a great one to make that bar seem to contain the whole of Ireland.
"Mahoney is a wonderfully effective catalytic agent: she goes to Ireland and just makes the country happen around her. Yet she regards her own character -- the unillusioned, soomewhat puritanical American stranger -- with the same sardonic eye that she focuses on everyon else in the bok. You find yourself simultaneously laughing aloud over the details and apalled by the picture those same details make up." --- Jonathan Raban, author of Coasting and Hunting for Mister Heartbreak
"Whoredom in Kimmage is a fascinating book: uncommonly well written, eminently readable, a thorough and perceptive investigation of its subject." --- William Trevor, Author of The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Two Lives
"Rosemary Mahoney has extraordinary antennae for the nuances of langauge and social relationships. Her ear is acute, her eye unfailing in picking up the wit, the poignancy, the wild and black humor of Ireland." --- Elizabeth Shannon, Author of I am of Ireland
REVIEWS
Time Magazine: “A quirky, observant chronicle . . . Mahoney has an infallible ear for the spoken word and eye for telling detail. Whoredom’s vignettes are encased in prose so pellucid and evocative that readers may want to stop and reread passages just to savor their rhythms and imagery.” -- John Elson
The American Spectator: "Whoredom in Kimmage is a delight . . . an exquisitely funny book --- and it is the only funny feminist book. . . . Mahoney has an effortlessly pretty prose style, and an uncanny eye . . . a literary talent that amounts to brilliance . . ."
Esquire: "Writing with a fondness that in true Hibernian fashion wavers not far from a frown, Mahoney vividly portrays a still-surperstitious, class-ridden country belatedly stumbling into modernity."
The New York Times Book Review: “Rosemary Mahoney has a wonderful ear and an alert, cutting sensibility.”
New York Newsday: “Whoredom in Kimmage is a superb book, the close and patient observation of a world by a writer whose highly developed consciousness expresses itself with ease, mystery, and grace.”
USA TODAY: “Mahoney creates lovely, funny, ultimately sad scenes… it is for these that you should read Whoredom in Kimmage.”
Kirkus Reviews: “A remarkably perceptive and engaging account of contemporary Irish women…a memorable portrait, by a natural storyteller and scholar, of a wonderfully eloquent and expressive people on the cusp of change.”
Publisher’s Weekly: “Mahoney…has the ability to chill the bones and make one feel loneliness as a theme of Irish life.”
Austin American-Statesman (Anne Morris): “This beautifully written nonfiction book benefits from the feel of fiction.”
Book of the Month Club News: “Whoredom in Kimmage is…a tart, perceptive, utterly beguiling portrait of Ireland new and old.”
Minneapolis City Pages (Gretchen Scherer): “Mahoney is a talented writer with a knack for description, and she re-creates with great economy and grace the smallest moments.”
Booklist: “Whoredom in Kimmage offers a vivid and nuanced portrait of a people and nation struggling to understand their place in a new and challenging world.”
John Hopkins Magazine (Dale Keiger): “Mahoney is a generous and sympathetic chronicler of small-scale lives, an author who accomplishes the difficult feat of placing herself in the center of the story without crowding anyone else off the page.”