The literary World Cup: readers' best all-time teams

Albert Camus (at the front, wearing a flat cap), the best real-life literary goalie – here, with the University of Algiers football team. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

Back when the World Cup was in those exciting and unpredictable first rounds, we were playing away at Penguin's imaginary books World Cup, where an England with JK Rowling, George Orwell and Agatha Christie in attack and the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in the midfield could possibly – possibly – have had a chance to win something.

The UK imprint imagined matches and footballing incidents on Twitter, and we joined in the fun, asking for your all-time favourite literary teams. Now that the actual competition is coming to an end, here are our top five writers' XIs.

TimFootman offered an all-nationalities, all-time XI with Albert Camus as goalkeeper (because – "duh" – the French author played as a goalie while studying at the University of Algeria). He chose a pretty hard-core defence (Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Samuel Richardson and Vikram Seth) "because you need big guys at the back", went for a self-explanatory "middlebrowfield" with John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Gaskell, and chose Bret Easton Ellis, Will Self and DBC Pierre in attack because, "as Mr Suárez proved, it's the scary, unpredictable, slightly bonkers ones who get results." No comment.

Photograph: Toby Moses

tagomagoman gave an extensive justification for this killer and eclectic XI, managed by "respected and innovative coach with a steely heart of darkness" Joseph Conrad. Some of our favourite picks:

James Joyce (centre-back): "The ultimate cultured centre-back famously left his native Ireland to learn his trade on the continent. It is a rare forward who can find a way past his impenetrable prose."

Cormac McCarthy (central midfield): "This tough tackling, no nonsense player patrols the border country between midfield and defence. If you thought the Comanche attack in Blood Meridian was brutal you should see what he does to a midfield runner who has the temerity to approach his territory."

F Scott Fitzgerald (central midfield): "Seen by some as a luxury player too keen to sit back and admire his own beautiful passes. Sometimes seems more concerned with his celebrity lifestyle with his glamorous wife than his career. But when he puts his mind to it, boy can he play. With the steely McCarthy beside him they form a formidable midfield."

William Burroughs (right midfield): "Old snake hips is one of the most feared wingers in the game. Has suffered with 'refuelling' issues in the past, but as long as he receives his 'vitamin supplement' before the game is a reliable asset. Famous for terrorising full-backs with his notorious cut-up technique that leaves them gasping for comprehension. Should score more goals, but suffers from a wayward shot."

Photograph: Toby Moses

neophil33 disagreed with Penguin's version of the French team and offered the following instead (with Anatole France, François Rabelais, Alphonse Daudet, Marguerite Duras, Louis Aragon, François Mauriac as subs), which sparked quite a debate. "That midfield could be a bit flaky", said shinerbock. "I'd have Proust among the subs – just in case you needed to bring someone on to run down the clock", offered AnotherBe. shinerbock jumped in again: "You can't have Rimbaud and Verlaine in the same team together. Even on opposite wings. There's no discipline there. Bring them on as 'impact subs', when Baudelaire's been sent off for showing off." Etcetera.

Photograph: Toby Moses

"At last, a competition Ireland will dominate", ventured theundertone. We had as many as four different Irish teams suggested – here's one by SanPaolo: from Patrick Kavanagh ("weird loner, ideal keeper") to Oscar Wilde ("big target man, ex-boxer, great turn – of phrase) and Samuel Beckett ("mercurial forward, famously not many kicks") on the attack and of course Joyce at the midfield ("creative, but tendency to overelaborate"). Although as Sunburst said, perhaps their star player would suffice: "between 11 best English novelists of the 20th century and one chapter of Ulysses, I'd confidently put my money on the latter."

Photograph: Toby Moses

And finally, how irresistible is this team from Ancient Rome suggested by Serdal:

Cicero (goalkeeper): "Reliable, can do everything, great reflexes, huge belief in his own abilities, can be a show-off, never to blame in his own mind."

Caesar (left-back): "Lean, efficient, fast, unfussy, able to influence referees with his propagandistic style."

Ovid (left midfield): "Great work-rate, though defensively suspect, the side's greatest technique and pacey as hell, should complement Caesar's qualities."

Virgil (central midfield): "Used to be a slim, tricky player, in his later days a player of gravity but lots of emotions, able to mix the rough and the magical."

Photograph: Toby Moses

There were so many other brilliant line-ups that we had to leave out – do take a look at the delightful thread, which included discussion of referees and even a wink to our own sports writers. And, as always, add your own or tell us what we’ve missed in the comments below. But let's close with a team from Magnusson which he promises will be "precise, efficient and beautiful in its simplicity":

Photograph: Toby Moses

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‘Arcadia:’ A Novel That Grows On Readers

The main character in Lauren Groff's engaging novel, Arcadia, grows up to become a photography professor who knows that for most of his students, his classes are way stations into a hobby.

"But his job, as he understands it," Groff writes, "is to help his students see: to make them pay attention, slow down and appreciate what they're doing. This is something they can use in life."

In a way, that's what Groff does by way of lovely writing and memorable characters who are haunted by the past. She makes us slow down and pay attention to a story that at first doesn't seem promising.

Ridley "Bit" Stone, the generous and gentle professor, is the child of hippies. He grew up on a commune, which like most hippie communes, rose and fell on its own excesses

The premise seems predictable: how dreams of living "with the land, not on it" crash into economic reality and human foibles that are complicated by drugs and sex. And won't the children of childish hippies end up rebelling against their rebellious parents?

But Groff's novel grew on me from its opening, in 1968, and as it stretches, with periodic interruptions, into the future that is 2018.

The commune, Arcadia, in upstate New York, was once home to hundreds. Decades later, its demise is summed up by a neighbor, an Amish woman who knows the tensions between community and freedom.

"Too much freedom, it rots things in communities, quick," she says. "That was the problem with your Arcadia."

The story is told mostly from the perspective of Bit, who weighs three pounds when he's born in a hippie caravan.

At 6, he struggles to teach himself to read (which he does) and to understand the world that's Arcadia (that would take a lifetime). At 14, he sees the commune collapse. Internal struggles are more to blame than a violent police drug bust.

Decades later, he's teaching in New York, with a 3-year-old daughter. His wife, another child of Arcadia, has disappeared. And finally, in 2018, in a world threatened by an epidemic and global warming, Bit returns to Arcadia with his mother, who's dying, and his daughter, who's now 14.

But it's not so much the story as the storytelling that grabbed me. It builds on the talents Groff displayed in her 2008 debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, which re-imagined the myths of the author's hometown, Cooperstown, N.Y.

In Arcadia, Bit thinks, his parents were once happy and he was happy as a child. Or was he?, he wonders and concludes, "Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine."

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