Cressida Leyshon

Deputy Fiction Editor at The New Yorker

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Articles

Jim Shepard on Catastrophes and Timing

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This week’s story, “The Queen of Bad Influences,” opens in 1913, in the English county of Gloucestershire, and is about a young woman called Constance who has recently left an all-girls’ school and is making her first foray into adulthood. What drew you to this time and place? As our sense of norms and national unity have disintegrated, I’ve become more fascinated with those historical cultures in which both were strong, if not so strong as to often seem oppressive.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Cockroaches and Commitment

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

The narrator of this week’s story, “Nocturnal Creatures,” works for a pest-control company. Why did you want to make your protagonist an exterminator? It seemed to me to be a fascinating profession that has considerable possibilities for conflict—and comedy. For starters, there are the day-to-day tasks of the job which involves contending with rats and roaches, etc., and which is essentially an unwinnable war.
Ayşegül Savaş on Friendship and Friction

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This week’s story, “Marseille,” takes place in the city of the title, where three friends are gathering for a short break. What drew you to Marseille as the setting? In response to a similar question you asked some years ago—about a story set in Rome—I remember saying that it was fun to write about arguments in beautiful settings. Here, again, I think I am drawn to the idea of a reunion in a charming place, and how that charm can suddenly tip.
Yiyun Li on Fiction with Little Space for Illusion

Mar 9, 2025 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This week’s story, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” takes place in a doctor’s office when the narrator, Lilian, is having her annual checkup. What drew you to this setting? There is a distance between a patient and a doctor or a nurse—there is an innate imbalance—and yet the procedures and conversations are deeply personal, even intrusive.
Sheila Heti on Boarding Schools and the Mind of a Writer

Jan 19, 2025 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. This week’s story, “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” is about a girls’ school that takes to the North Atlantic Ocean aboard a ship during a time of war. When did this premise first come to you? Did it arrive fully formed or start with a single image or episode or character? I guess it came fully formed.
Lee Chang-dong on South Korea in the Nineteen-Eighties and Today

Dec 22, 2024 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This story is based on a real incident involving my father that occurred in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan was at its height. But it was not published in a literary magazine until 1988, after some measure of democratization had been achieved. However, depicting a person who claimed to be a spy for North Korea was still a sensitive issue that touched on major taboos in Korean society at the time, so I had to write it with some discretion.
Lauren Groff on Work and Love

Dec 8, 2024 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This week’s story, “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has taken early retirement from her job. For the first time in her life, she finds herself with nothing to do. How destabilizing is this moment for her?
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms

Nov 17, 2024 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

The narrator of your story “Minimum Payment Due” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to avoid calls from collection agencies. Did you want to write a story about debt? Yes, that was definitely the starting point. It’s a compelling predicament to have a character embroiled in debt, with its automatic urgency and its built-in stakes, and there seems to be a universality to debt—or at least the fear of it.
Paul Yoon on Bringing Animals Into the Foreground

Oct 20, 2024 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

Your story “War Dogs” takes place in an animal-care facility at an airport. When did you come up with this as the setting for a piece of fiction? This is hardly an original thought—and there are tons of writers who have been exploring this for a long time—but as I was working on my last book, “The Hive and the Honey,” I began to form a deep artistic interest in the possibilities of using the canvas of fiction to tell stories where the points of view and perspectives are less centered on . . . humans.
Joshua Cohen on Absorbing and Assimilating Events

Oct 13, 2024 | newyorker.com | Cressida Leyshon

This week’s story, “My Camp,” opens with its narrator, a writer, searching for a holiday house in the depths of the New Jersey countryside, an activity he describes as a compulsion or an addiction. Why did you choose New Jersey? How addictive is the search for property? New Jersey chose me: I was born there and grew up on the Jersey Shore, just past the southern terminus of the Pine Barrens, where this story is set.