Have you ever watched a five year old try to make his bed? It's quite the overwhelming task, and when Bradley continually ends up with a lump right in the middle of his bed, he becomes very imaginative about what might be under his covers to create the lump. But the fun begins when his mother gets caught right in the middle of his wild imagination!

As a little girl attempts to make her bed, fabulous fantasies appear one after the other, making lumps where lumps shouldn't be! No matter how hard she tries, the work she does becomes undone by pirates, airplanes, race cars, and more. What can possibly be responsible for this thrilling, yet mind-boggling, mystery? Delightful illustrations by Sandra Hoover bring this charming story to life.

Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father? Keisner’s fears mature as she becomes a wife and mother, and the boogeyman under the bed shape-shifts, though its shapes are no less frightening—a young aunt’s drowning, the “chest chomp” in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother’s belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: “Don’t be afraid.” In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.

Angel . . . or the devil in disguise? On one final mission for the Crown, David Donally is hunting for a missing treasure. His only clue is a dazzling, gem-encrusted earring, and it is leading him to the most desirable woman he has ever known . . . an enchanting thief he once seduced and betrayed in the name of duty . . . an exquisite lover he'd believed was dead . . . his wife! Meg Faraday thought her former life was behind her—until the night the treacherous husband she'd eluded suddenly appeared. By rights she should despise the handsome spy who had captured her heart, then shattered it. But the fire between them still burns, and what was once an irresistible passion has now become a dangerous game of betrayal . . .