The original Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon was the quirky, confessional, list-ridden bed-book of a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court in the tenth century, still fascinating and in print eleven centuries later.

In Pearls in Vinegar, popular Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick contemporizes many of the qualities of Sei Shonagon's book with her own peculiar, insightful, and witty commentary on one hundred and sixty diverse subjects, including Things That Make You Appreciate Men, Poetic Subjects, Hateful Things, Adorable Things, Things That Fall from the Sky, Different Ways of Speaking, and Lacrimae Rerum. Built on one woman's observations, it's an itemized collection of essays, short lists, long lists, comforts, toxicities, things you should be ashamed to laugh at but do anyway, and many small privacies that illuminate a new corner of the world.

Confessional without self-glorification or self-abnegation, funny and affecting, and, above all, honest, Pearls in Vinegar is a bracing antidote to all that is bland, dull, and homogenous. Read it and laugh.

Heather Mallick's smart, witty, acerbic take on an ancient literary form, the Japanese pillow book

Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick demonstrates that hers is an often hilarious, sometimes peculiar, and always engaging corner of the world. Her pillow book covers snake balls, the long leather-booted legs of RCMP officers, gardenias, the quirks of German cannibalism, the weirdness of all workplaces, Texas decapitation, menstruation, the advantages of obsessive-compulsive disorder, why the people you didn't sleep with are more interesting than those with whom you did, and why life is best in Paris.

Praise for Heather Mallick
"Heather Mallick is both an iconoclast and a wit. Pearls in Vinegar is always frank and perceptive on the many topics of modern life, and often outright hilarious. It's filled with pleasures."
—John Doyle, Globe and Mail columnist

Praise (sort of) for Heather Mallick:
O'Reilly: Are you a socialist?
Mallick: Yes, certainly.
O'Reilly: Are you anti-American?
Mallick: I'm generally opposed to American values, which are overly money-centred.
O'Reilly: OK, interesting. I have advised the Canadian government I will no longer buy Canadian products or visit the country.
—From The O'Reilly Factor, FOX News Network