Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: Tolstoy’s spell, the new Whitney Museum, Auden and Britten, Baltimore’s police, the reader’s idea of the writer, and a ballet derived from, or based on, Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Dreams and Anna Karenina Janet Malcolm If the dream is father to imaginative literature, Tolstoy may be the novelist who most closely hews to its deep structures.   ADVERTISEMENT   In the New Whitney Ingrid D. Rowland Approaching from its east side, the building looks like a cruise ship, with an impressively inviting stack of observation decks promising spectacular views over Lower Manhattan.   On Benjamin Britten W.H. Auden What immediately struck me, as someone whose medium was language, about Britten the composer was his extraordinary musical sensibility in relation to the English language.   ADVERTISEMENT   Baltimore: What Hasn’t Changed Steven H. Wright The indictment and possible conviction of six police officers is likely to be little more than a symbolic act of accountability.   The Writer’s Shadow Tim Parks How is it possible that even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer distinct from my response to the work?   Dancing Mrs. Dalloway Adam Thirlwell Should a ballet be about something? Wayne McGregor’s brilliant, uneven, tender Woolf Works offers one way of thinking about this constant conundrum for the art of ballet.