Robert Pinget's short, little play is about two actors deciding how best to stage a production that can grab an audience. Should they tell the story in a conventional narrative arc or do something a la Calvino, i.e., a series of false starts? Should they include an orgy to hold the audience's attention or would a meditation on death be more appropriate? Pinget's delightful play, written almost thirty years ago, portends the nasty notion of "test audiences" and is more than relevant today.

The book takes place in poetic sections, as if part of a notebook, and its subject is, I think, "voice": the voice of its fictional elderly narrator, whose finds pleasure in little things, such as food. The Be Brave of the title seems transparently to speak of death, but the details of each entry are touching. Read it with Théo or the New Era, which reads as if a companion to Be Brave (both published by the same publisher)