If you’re not familiar with Community Bookstore‘s backyard, drop everything and get down there immediately. It might just be the quietest place in Brooklyn. Plus, you might just see a few turtles.

Follow Community Bookstore on Twitter at @CommunityBkstr, find them on Facebook, and they’re also on Tumblr. They’re located at 143 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.

Books bought today

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories by Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble’s novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony–all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs, in stories that are perceptive, sharp, and funny. With an introduction by the Spanish academic Jose Fernandez that places the stories in the context of her life and her novels, this collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.

My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley

When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own–this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making “My Father and Myself” a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.