The Patron Saint of White Menageries: Stories by Lauren T. Davila

Los Angeles, With the Magic Left In

The Patron Saint of White Menageries is Lauren T. Davila’s debut story collection, described as a guide to magical Los Angeles by one of the city’s native daughters. Rather than treating LA as a glossy backdrop, the book promises a local’s route through places where the everyday and impossible can occupy the same block.

A City Told in Many Doors

The short-story form gives Davila room to approach that magical city from multiple lives and angles. A collection can move between neighborhoods, moods, and varieties of wonder without forcing Los Angeles into one definitive narrative, making the city itself the thread connecting otherwise distinct encounters.

Magical realism is the collection’s key invitation. The strange does not need to arrive as a separate fantasy world; it can emerge inside familiar streets and ordinary experience, revealing what a strictly realistic map would leave out.

An Editor Steps Forward as an Author

Davila has previously edited several anthologies, including work in BIPOC gothic fiction, and is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer. This debut shifts the focus from assembling other voices to establishing the shape of her own fictional Los Angeles.

The Patron Saint of White Menageries arrives September 1. It is a promising choice for readers who prefer cities not as settings to pass through, but as living collections of memory, invention, and hidden rules.