Because we thought the challenge wasn’t hard enough, we asked filmmaker Adam to summarize the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one minute.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Shuan Duke for getting a free copy of Wire to Wire by Scott Sparling.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Bright Before Us by Katie Arnold-Ratliff. Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into unbearable grief and all-consuming paranoia. As his behavior grows increasingly erratic, and tensions arise with the school principal and the parents of his students, he faces the familiar urge to flee—a choice that forces him to confront the character weaknesses that have shattered his life again and again, and to accept the wrenching truth about the past he’s never been able to move beyond. A haunting debut novel, Bright Before Us explores the fraught journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the startling limits to which we are driven by grief.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.

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I’ve written several posts about gender inequity in the writing profession here at LitDrift. To catch up, read those posts here, here and here.

It’s still hard out there for us ladywriters. Writer-esses? Oi vey.

First we have celebrated (Nobel laureate, ahem) writer, novelist and essayist V.S. Naipaul saying that there is no woman who is his literary equal. I’ll let him do the talking (courtesy of The Guardian piece):

He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.

Then we have the newly-released statistics, courtesy of VIDA, that analyze the gender breakdown of the authors included in the Best American anthologies in poetry, fiction, and essays. I’ll let the numbers do the talking:

In the Best American Essays Series from 1986 through 2010, the numbers look dire across the board. Works by women accounted for only 29% of those published in the anthology. There was only one year in twenty-five that the number of works by women published in the anthology outnumbered the works by men.

Read the complete results here.

Gender equity in publishing is still escaping our grasp, but with the exciting growth of independent presses and publishers cropping up around the country, perhaps this will slowly start to change.

John Irving’s The World According to Garp summarized in 60 seconds. Watch it!