Stranded : Rock and Roll for a Desert Island

A new edition of this classic of rock journalism that first asked the question: What one album would you bring to a desert island, and why?

In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty other writers on rock -- including Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, Simon Frith, and Robert Christgau -- a question: What one rock and roll album would you take to a desert island? The resulting essays were collected in Stranded, twenty passionate declarations that, appropriately, affirmed the solitary and obsessive activity that rock listening had become. Here are salutes, elegies, thank-you notes, and love letters to records such as the Rolling Stones'' Beggars Banquet , the Ramones'' Rocket to Russia, Captain Beefheart''s Trout Mask Replica, Something Else By the Kinks, and out-of-print classics by the Ronettes, Little Willie John, and Huey ''Piano'' Smith; the whole is supplemented with Marcus''s own invaluable annotated fifty-page discography, a "Treasure Island" of rock and roll. Stranded remains a classic of rock and roll literature, and perhaps the best possible answer to the question: What one rock and roll book would you take to a desert island?