It's not often that the New Yorker makes a dumb mistake, but there's one on the Contributors page of the current (Feb. 6) issue. Tobias Wolff is in fact the author of three books of short stories, two memoirs, one novella, and two novels, one of which is out of print. He does, however, teach at Stanford. Weird that it's still on the website as of 3:22 PST on 2/1.
On the other hand, any issue of any magazine that includes pieces by Wolff, Malcolm Gladwell, and Katherine Boo is OK by me. Too bad there isn't an article about Alan Moore's Watchmen, though. That would put it over the top.
Update: I didn't really get the Wolff story -- or at least, it failed to produce that mysterious effect in me that most of Wolff's stories do, where I feel somehow oddly transformed and have no idea how or why. In my MFA program people talk about this effect of stories all the time, but to be totally honest I've rarely if ever felt it outside of Wolff's fiction -- not in classics like "Farewell My Brother," even. But pretty much every story in any of TW's collections does it to me every time. I quite liked the Man United piece until Zack pointed out how many things were missing, though.
2/1/06
