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These Dogs, Cats And Robots Have A Few 'Tiny Confessions'

Let me tell you a quick story from NPR's move from our old headquarters to our new one.

When I was emptying out my old desk and workspace, in addition to all the shoes under my desk and an alarming number of vessels designed to keep coffee warm, I had quite a lot of books lying around. Some were upcoming books, most were old books, and a few were books I neither had any use for nor could bear to get rid of. One of the tests I applied was that if I picked up a book and the first page I opened to made me laugh, it survived.

Tiny Confessions survived.

It's a little book out today from Christopher Rozzi, just prints from his site of the same name. There are candidly zillions of books like this a year, little gags and jokes and silly ideas that somebody had, and it takes quite a lot to elevate them to the point where the book is well worth picking up or giving somebody as a gift. But now and then, there's one that's really pretty great, and that's how this one struck me.

There's not a lot to this concept; it's just paintings of cats and dogs, mostly, with the occasional robot or conch shell thrown in. And then there's a confession. They look like this.

/ Penguin
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Penguin
/ Penguin
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Penguin

Some are more hilarious (a cat who proclaims, "I could literally spend an entire day just pushing your phone off a table"); some are more sweet (a dog who says, "I absolutely adore you; all others are on notice"). But they're all really clever, and the site where the prints are sold is worth checking out.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.