Ten Top Stories

by David A. Sohn

Humor, fantasy, love, adventure, danger, courage, death . . . The stories in this book were picked by young adults

Here is a brilliant anthology. The editor presented students with the most popular stories published in the last several years. Then he Choose the best, choose the ones that grip you in a vise of excitement and won’t let you go, the ones that leave you with a sense of mystery and strangeness, the ones that rock you with laughter, the ones that really mean something to you as a young adult.

The result is the brightest, freshest, most original collection of proven popular stories published in decades.

Genres: Young Adult, Fiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1985

Reviews

[Trevor Fletcher]

Personal Response
Ten Top Stories was a great book. I really enjoyed how the author, David A. Sohn, put short stories in one book. It was perfect for me, because I have a short attention span and would have lost interest pretty quick. The ten stories in this book are So Much Unfairness Of Things, Hoods I Have Known, See How They Run, Planet Of The Condemned, Flowers For Algernon, Test, Backward Boy, Polar Night, Denton’s Daughter, and The Turtle. Some of the stories to be honest are not that interesting, but for the most part the majority of them were good. I will talk about one of the ten stories.

Plot
Due to the short stories it did not have a specific plot. The stories were about teens and younger students. In one of the stories, Backward Boy, the plot took place in middle school. The story was about a kid that was different. The boy had to go to a special education classroom separated from the rest of the students. He got picked on without knowing it. Back in the day people didn’t understand autism so most students ignored people with autism like a plage. The students that didn’t ignore them teased them really bad. Some of the kids made Auber feel like they were his friends, but they were really just picking on him.

Characterization
Since there are so many different stories, I’m just going to talk about one of the characters from the story Backward Boy. The main character was Auber Dubois. Auber suffers from autism but he handles it better than the usual kid with autism. He can do things on his own, but he struggles badly for some things. He speaks with a slur and doesn’t make sense all the time. Auber has to go to a special classroom which was pretty lucky for him, because back in the day people didn’t understand autism and sometimes they would end up in sanitariums for scientist to do some study on them.

Settings
Since the the book had ten different stories, it would be hard to list all of them. Some the stories took place in the early 1900s, some earlier, and some later. In the story Backward Boy, the setting took place in the Wasilla Woods near the Talkeetna Mountains in Alaska. Wasilla Woods in a small town in Alaska. The story took place at the school in Wasilla Woods. It was a couple of years after World War II.

Recommendation
I recommend this book to students who like shorter stories. This book is great for students that have a short attention span such as myself. This book would be great for students through Sophomore to Seniors. The book suits both genders through sixteen to eighteen years old.

[Hung]

Ah, this takes me back to the spinning paperback shelves of my childhood library. While I generally don't plan to use goodreads to list all the books I read when I was young, this book is a special case, because it's important to me less for the stories themselves than for what they seem to represent. Such a fascinating and curious collection, Ten Top Stories, and a microcosm it seems to me, of the lives of published short fiction. Of the ten stories, only two, I would say, went on to have any lasting notoriety. There's "Flowers for Algernon," of course, which became a novel and eventually a minor classic in "young adult" fiction (although the author published it as a piece of speculative fiction, even winning Hugo and Nebula Awards). I didn't know it at the time, but "So Much Unfairness of Things" was also somewhat widely read and occasionally anthologized, owing perhaps to the fact that it was first published in the New Yorker (btw, how many New Yorker stories these days will ever end up in a YA anthology?).

Two out of ten. All of the other titles faded away into near complete anonymity. Some deservedly so--a couple of the stories I remember being very lackluster and (kiss of death) juvenile. But some of the now-forgotten titles really deserved to be read;"The Turtle," for instance, struck me in a way I hadn't felt before.

Looking at the book's description, I can just imagine how hip and progressive the publisher and editor must have felt in 1964 when the collection first came out. "A brilliant new kind of anthology." We're going to let the students decide what's good. Power to the people!. It's a peculiar little volume, that's for sure. And in the end, having 1 out of 10 of your contemporary selections reach "minor classic" status(my designation, of course) and another that achieved some level of readership might not be that bad of a percentage.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this book since high school, at least, and probably bought it at a Scholastic Book Fair. The only story I remembered was "Flowers for Algernon" and on re-reading the collection, I realize that's because it is the only memorable one. The rest were probably reasonably well-received by the editors, and the introduction confirms that, but they were all from the heyday of the short story (the 1940's and '50's.) Most of them first appeared in magazines or collections, and we know what's happened to those outlets. Anyway, out it goes.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

November 1964
Bantam Books i believe

---

The classic 60s junior high school book where the English teacher will dump the short story
Charly
on you!

and possibly others, if they are any good with a creative curriculum

sohn did some interesting editorial work in his day with Bantam Books

[Daisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

there were definetely not the best stories, in my opinion, but i liked a few: test, backward boy, flowers for algernon

[Cameron Frierson]

The book I have read and am now reviewing is called, "Ten Top Stories" This book contains ten stories within it, those stories are; So Much Unfairness of Things, Hoods I Have Known, See How They Run, Planet of The Condemned, Flowers For Algernon, Backward Boy, Test, Polar Night, Denton's Daughter, and The Turtle. This book was published June 1st, 1985. It was published by Bantam.

This expository essay is to convey the facts and other opinions of bullying, and to show both sides of bullying whether they are good or bad. Whether you actually think them to be good or bad is your choice. Flowers for Algernon had quite a bit a of bullying. They bullied him for being socially inadequate, slow in the head, and not having the capability to understand the most common of ideas and theories. He had been put through serious testing, the testing was to see if you could turn a "retard" into a thoroughly thinking genius.

The smarter he got, the better he understood the bullying. At some points he thought to himself intensely. He realized that, though he was slow while being bullied, he was slowly grasping the thought of rising over the bullying scale to a point where he would be like everyone else; some sort of conformity. As his intellect grows, his childhood memories recollect at a faster rate, he remembers his sister having her menstruation and how he thought she was stabbed in the groin. His mother laughed at first, and then began to cry.

His father made fun of him. Through this, as his intellect began to grow as did his courage. Since he has long since lost contact with his family he goes back to the most recent bullying he can remember, his co-workers had bullied him, and so he returns to the kitchen he may refer to in his own mind as a kitchen of hell, in order to find answers. Furious he barks his questions, yet finding only confusion. Being able to bark orders to those that have oppressed you, does that not convey some sort of toughness? Did the bullying make him a hard-minded individual? Has the harsh and coarse language used at his expense not helped him to grasp the thought of conformity? Although these questions may seem positive...

Were the tears really worth it? He may have learned but truly at what expense? Is ignorance truly bliss in his case? At the ending the operation has failed, he is again an unsocial dunce, but through this failure of an experience he says, "Letting people laugh at him seemed to achieve one of the aspirations he had", the aspiration being that he wanted more friends. Decide of bullying what you will, the decision is completely yours.

So Much Unfairness of Things: A child at the age of 14 who likes to be called P.S. He is the 15th in his family to go to a Virginia Preparatory school. There are cliques, groups, some to be described as a small town full of a large family. At this campus, in these small groups, the new members are to be hazed in order to join. These hazings take at least a year in order to become part of the "family" (The group, clique, etc.) It's quite common.

These hazings how ever, are called extreme by others. Some hazings consist of being woken up around some late hour, being shaved bald and hairless, being wrapped up in 2 layers of bed sheets and thrown into a lake. How ever, the most used hazing within the book is used when a toad (a pledge, a new member of the group) answers a question wrong or does something out of the box (rules) of the experienced members. They must bend over, keeping their knees straight, grab there ankles, and pull there body towards there knees, they must do this until the experienced member told them to stop or until they answered some questions correctly. It can be painful, it can be physically disfiguring.

But through these hazings, does the pledge not feel stronger and proud of them self for making it such tough times? Do they not feel the pride of acceptance, and the welcoming hugs of a new and welcoming family? Though the conjoining might of a bonding and trustful family may be worth it, are the physical scars truly worth it? Is the emotional anguish of being embarrassed, branded, treated as if you were some lesser being or a worthless pile of scat truly worth it? It's for you, the reader, to decide.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hit and miss--a few good stories (how they adapted Flowers for Algernon was interesting, though it deserves the full book), and the driving test story was good, but many "meh" ones as well.