Everything Is Cake

Inspired by Francisco de Goya's profoundly unsettling masterpiece, 'Los Disparates' ('The Follies'), Daniel O'Reilly's Everything is Cake offers twenty-two short stories that translate the artist's incisive, grotesque, and absurd realism into literary form. This collection is a descent into the nature of folly-a "light" madness where the horrific and the nonsensical rupture the mirror-image of proud human Reason. Within these pages, characters are thrown into bizarre existence, abandoned in worlds drafted hastily by a distracted creator. A man seeking escape finds himself literally trapped and seduced by the ancient walls of a city. A captured military drone is reprogrammed with poetry, taught how to be sad so it can teach other drones to give up the will to fight. A birthday party guest begins to suspect that the furniture, the food, and even the other people are not what they seem. What begins as a pilgrimage into the heart of a great artist's vision becomes an abduction of the senses. O'Reilly holds up a splintered mirror to our world, forcing us to confront the existential paradoxes and monstrous faces that look back when we least expect it. For as Goya warned, "The sleep of reason produces monsters. Daniel O'Reilly is a British author, artist and musician living in Spain. His first collection of short stories entitled 'Everything is Cake', inspired by the engravings of Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, will be published by Sulfur Editions in late 2025. Daniel's short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and yearbooks. He was awarded 'Contributor of the Month' for short fiction by Zoetic Press in 2024 for the short story 'Everything is Cake', and has published fiction in the Margate Bookie Zine, Alien Buddha Zine, Trilobite Literary Journal, Tiny Spoon, Writer's Block, and Black Flowers Literary magazine, amongst others. Daniel writes a fortnightly literary blog on Patreon about the development of 'Everything is Cake': hptts://www.patreon.com/danieloreillyIn 2024 Daniel performed original music and performance art at the opening ceremony of the Centenary of Surrealism at Maison André Breton in France. He also exhibited fiction, photographs and music at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo & Alexandria, Egypt in 2023. He was a resident for six months at Auroville Radio in India in 2016. Daniel has also screened his short movies in over twenty countries. He is the creator of the internet art laboratory The Unstitute: www.theunstitute.org