Everything is Cake

by Daniel O'Reilly

Inspired by Francisco de Goya's profoundly unsettling engravings '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 in which 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.

Bonus feature: This edition contains an original soundtrack by the author, accessible via QR code inside.

Everything is Cake in the press:
The title story ‘Everything is Cake’ was published at Zoetic Press in February 2024, and Daniel was awarded ‘Contributor of the Month’ for the story. This story was also published in the ‘Heathentide Orphans’ annual chapbook by Zoetic Press. The story 'Paltry Threads' was published in the Journal of Experimental Literature in autumn 2025.

About the author:
Daniel O’Reilly is a British author, artist and musician living in Spain. His short stories have been published in the Margate Bookie Zine, the Journal of Experimental Fiction, Alien Buddha Zine, Trilobite Literary Journal, Tiny Spoon, Writer's Block, and Black Flowers Literary magazine, amongst other literary journals.

310 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2025

About the author

Daniel O’Reilly is a British author, artist and musician living in Spain. His debut collection of short stories entitled Everything is Cake, inspired by the engravings of Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, was published by Sulfur Editions in November 2025.

In 2024 he performed music and performance art compositions at the Centenary of Surrealism exhibition at Maison André Breton in France. He also exhibited fiction, photographs and music at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo & Alexandria, Egypt.

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, the Journal of Experimental Fiction, Alien Buddha Zine, Trilobite Literary Journal, Tiny Spoon, Writer's Block, and Black Flowers Literary magazine, amongst others.