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)

Music | ‘Kwass Meda,’ a soccer field ‘where we will be joyous’

At the conclusion of the 2008 African Cup of Nations, we offer a new translation of Ejigayehu Shibabaw’s, or Gigi’s, song “Kwass Meda” (Soccer Field). The song features on the 2000 release One Ethiopia, with the translation from Amharic by Solomon Abebe and his nephew, Befekadu. (Feb 11)

Poetry | Slippery white pitch / Tricky footing for linesmen (w/ video)

Atlanta, Jan 20 | The freakish confluence of Arctic cold with Gulf of Mexico–spawned low pressure on Jan 19 seemed to bode great things for the three-seven-year-old Metropolitan Atlanta Casual Soccer League.

Snow started falling at 10 a.m., an hour before matchtime. Children shouted in the cold. Atlantans had the steering wheels of 2½-ton sport-utility vehicles in their viselike grips, praying for safe passage over slightly damp pavement.

Books | A majestic history built around games (w/ podcast)

Jan 5 | The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, by David Goldblatt, appears at booksellers in North America this week, and we wonder how many will read the title’s four words as a direct challenge to the myth of American centrality in all things. With 50-minute podcast.

Books | Drumsagart Thistle, Nick Hornby and the literary imagination

Jeffrey Hill’s book Sport and the Literary Imagination: Essays in History, Literature and Sport (Peter Lang, 2006)—recently reviewed online by the Sport Literature Association—includes chapters on the foundational works by Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) and Nick Hornby.

Germa(i)ne words on Italians

As an Australian-born feminist and possessor of an educated Continental palate, author Germaine Greer does not often find an opening for digressions into sport (see also 16 Dec 03). But with the fastiduous Fabio Capello having been hired to graft Italian flair onto a stylistically maladroit England side, Greer spots the opportunity to write about the man from San Canzian d’Isonzo, Gorizia, whose name translates as “Mr. Hair.” (Dec 17)

Umberto Eco, deconstructor of football

Umberto Eco, 75, hung over from jet lag and downing Macallan whisky on doctor’s orders, parries with Financial Times writer Jan Dalley (Dec 15). But even in the gamut of conversation, from potential fiction projects to beauty to the yoke of slavery accepted when cracking open a lobster claw, Eco flirts just twice with football-related chatter. (Dec 16)

Literature | ‘The planet is a ball’ … certainly in Suriname

Paramaribo, Suriname, Dec 12 | An itinerant search for football in the sweltering nether-zone of Suriname—hard to reach, its own authenticity as a country diminished by the locals—carries the reader through Daniel Titinger’s 6,100-word narrative, “Kicking the Ball to Holland,” in the Virginia Quarterly Review (fall 07).

Simon Kuper in Turkey

Turkey already has shown a European orientation through its football, writer Simon Kuper said Nov 29 at the “100th Year Sports and Science Congress,” organized by Fenerbahçe. (Dec 11)

Books | Barzun’s signature tome

“[O]fficial history ignores soccer,” Eduardo Galeano has written, but Jacques Barzun does not respond completely, judging by the sports snippets in his cultural tome, From Dawn to Decadence: Five Hundred Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present.

Brazil | ‘Invisible chain of solidarity’ (w/ podcast)

Football-generated passions, says Coelho, will propel Brazil toward 2014

Paris, Nov 8 | Within 24 hours of writing about Brazil’s successful presentation to host the 2014 World Cup and the role of writer Paulo Coelho in the bid effort, we received a message from one of Coelho’s assistants, taking note of our comments. We speak with Coelho about his role in the bid and the place of football in Brazilian life.