Colm Toibin on Joni Mitchell - James Wood on The Who - Stacey D'Erasmo on Kate Bush - Daniel Handler on Eurythmics - Lisa Dierbeck on the Pretenders - Clifford Chase on the B-52s . . . and other writers on the soundtracks of their lives

In Heavy Rotation, twenty of our most acclaimed contemporary writers pay homage to the record albums that inspired them. Benjamin Kunkel remembers how the Smiths' Queen Is Dead transformed him into an adolescent Anglophile. Pankaj Mishra describes how a bootleg cassette of ABBA's Super Trouper evoked a world far from his...