In Chicago midfields, Hemon discovers transcendental soccer nation
For Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-born writer, lack of soccer means spiritual death. With interview »
Category: Language & Literature
Nov 30, 2009 | 0 comments
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Anatoly Kuznetsov and Dynamo Kyiv’s ‘almost incredible’ story
Anatoly Kuznetsov’s work, smuggled to the UK in 1969, contained what would become, when translated, one of the first English-language accounts of Dynamo Kyiv’s deeds during World War II.
Jun 18, 2009 | 0 comments
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Settling Palestinian question in ‘90-minute war’
In Itay Meirson’s first novel, Milchemet Tisheem Hadakot (The 90-Minute War), the intractable Middle Eastern dispute over Palestine is decided in one football match. The winning team keeps the Holy Land. The losers get eastern Oregon.
May 10, 2009 | 0 comments
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The day that Samuel Pepys did not play football
In the whirl of 17th-century London life, diarist Samuel Pepys had too many appointments to indulge in the well-established practice of street soccer. But, one frosty morn in Jan 1665, he notices a street “full of footballs.”
Mar 26, 2009 | 0 comments
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No último minuto (‘In the last minute’)
We publish a translation of a 1978 short story by Brazilian author Sérgio Sant’Anna in which a goalkeeper’s anxiety and his separation from fellows figure large: “The stadium explodes and I feel my own head bursting apart. … It’s like everything is very far away, without any relation to me.”
Feb 25, 2009 | 2 comments
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Israeli writers’ trophy leads to ‘emptiness of the day after’
Assaf Gavron, captain of the Israeli writers’ XI (see 9 Dec 08), regards football as a legitimate literary subject: “The main appeal is to accomplish the boyhood dream of many men really, not only writers. It is to be a football star.” With podcast »
Dec 19, 2008 | 2 comments
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For 3 days in Tel Aviv, football becomes more than metaphor
As part of a broader cultural exchange, Israel hosts an international Writers’ League tournament, including England and Germany, from Dec 14–16. A side of Israeli authors reprises a May friendly against Germany in Berlin, during which novelist Assaf Gavron confirmed his intuition that Germans do not miss penalties. (Dec 12)
Brazil | Marta’s story deserves to be told, but who deserves to tell it?
A package of articles published Oct 5 on Brazilian Web portal Terra details the unique pressures facing Diego Graciano in promoting his biography of sensational 22-year-old Marta Vieira da Silva (see earlier articles, Sept 15 and 12 Sept 07). (Oct 13)
Oct 13, 2008 | 0 comments
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Women’s football | ‘This book is dedicated to other Martas, barefoot and dirty’
Translation of the preface and prologue to Você é mulher, Marta (You Are a Woman, Marta!) (2008), the new biography of Marta Vieira da Silva by Diego Graciano. (Sept 15)
Cinema | A soccer player’s escape from Argentina … into philosophy
Claudio Tamburrini—philosophy professor and former goalkeeper—speaks about his Mar 1978 decision to “opt for life” and escape an Argentine prison. With podcast »
Aug 27, 2008 | 0 comments
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In 1937 appearance, Joyce joined Hungarians ‘in the middle’
Why has a 1937 alignment of literary stars not featured in Vienna in the European Championship’s cultural program? Vladimir Nabokov lectures in a Parisian literary salon and espies James Joyce “sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team.”
Books | ‘Global Game’ anthology en route from University of Nebraska Press
The Global Game: Writers on Soccer is scheduled for November release—the product of some three years of compiling, winnowing and permissions seeking by myself and editors Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, along with strong support and belief from the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln and heroic efforts from a network of translators, working in Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and Slovenian. (Apr 24)
Apr 24, 2008 | 0 comments
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Health | The goalkeeper’s anxiety at the filtered cigarette
Portsmouth goalkeeper David James writes an entertaining column for Guardian Unlimited, most recently meditating on the cultural contact between football and smoking and confessing his own “15-year 20-a-day habit” (“It’s Time for the Whole Game to Stub Out My Filthy Habit,” Mar 16). (Mar 19)
Mar 19, 2008 | 0 comments
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Poetry | ‘View well this Ball, the present of your Lords …’
We publish an excerpt from Matthew Concanen the Elder’s 1720 canto describing a six-a-side football match in Dublin—at variance with a traditional view that only the frenzied folk football variety was contested at the time. The players “around the field in decent order stand …” (Mar 13)
Books | For centuries, life has had its uppies and downies
Hugh Hornby, author of a comprehensive account of Britain’s 15 surviving festival football games—Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain (English Heritage, 2008)—says the ideal venue for these mass-participation events is a town of between 5,000 and 10,000. With podcast »
Mar 12, 2008 | 4 comments
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Books | Alan Sillitoe, channeling the angry young football man
Alan Sillitoe’s work was on the syllabus in my short-story class as a college freshman. Naturally, the story considered most representative was “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” consisting of a teenage cross-country runner’s interior dialogues upon liberation each day from the Borstal fetters (“I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me …”).
But a fresh assessment on Sillitoe’s 80th birthday today suggests that the short story “The Match,” which takes its tone from the terrace gloaming at Notts County’s Meadow Lane, might be the best introduction. (Mar 4)
Books | Murakami runs from soccer, to the distance
As a sidebar to the Feb 29 entry (“A multihued archipelago, tuned to soccer’s harmonics”), part-time Hawai‘i resident Haruki Murakami reflects in a recent Spiegel Online interview on his sporting interests and their relationship to his writing (“When I Run I Am in a Peaceful Place,” Feb 20). (Mar 1)
Trinidad & Tobago | Watching the match by not watching it
Global Voices profiles writer and blogger Nicholas Laughlin of Port of Spain, whose innovations include watching a football match by not watching it. (Feb 25)
Feb 25, 2008 | 0 comments
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Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has campaigned to relocate the remains of goalkeeper-cum-existentialist Albert Camus from their resting place in Lourmarin. 
