The Washington Post - Annie Groer
What imbues Give Me Everything You Have with its considerable humanity is Lasdun's thoughtful exploration of the broader subjects of reputation, temptation, virtue, honor and ego, from his first schoolboy reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through the work of Sylvia Plath, Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence, among others.
The New York Times Book Review - Scott Bradfield
…[a] smart, rigorous and beautifully written memoir about being on the unwelcome end of someone else's attention…The ultimate revenge of people like Nasreen is that eventually they can get you to start thinking about them as much as they're already thinking about you, and the strength of Lasdun's latest book…is that he takes this meditation on a disastrous relationship into wider, and often more productive, arenas of discussion…On every page, Lasdun's prose is absorbing, involving and perfectly expressed.
From the Publisher
Starred Review. "This subtle, compassionate take on the subject is rife with insights into the current cyberculture's cult of anonymity, as well as the power, failure, and magic of writing." - Publishers Weekly
One of the "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2012 Book Preview" titles. - The Millions
"A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age." - Kirkus Reviews
"Here is a chilling account of what it is to experience 'verbal terrorism' in the age of email and the Internet - a riveting memoir of James Lasdun's nightmare experience of having been stalked for five years by a deranged former student who is also a virulent anti-Semite. This must be the most informative, the most insightful, and the most beautifully written of any account from the victim's perspective of what has come to be called 'cyberbullying.'" - Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black Dahlia & White Rose
"James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have is an autobiographical work, rare, beautiful, bitter, and profoundly accepting of his own experience: a former female student stalks him viciously for years. The story Lasdun tells is applicable to all human experience." - Paula Fox
"Give Me Everything You Have is a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched." - J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Diary of a Bad Year
"Give Me Everything You Have is a riveting, searingly honest meditation on anti-Semitism, desire, the writing life, and a consciousness held prisoner by a force beyond its reach or control. James Lasdun has taken a dark event from his life and placed it powerfully in the wider realm of literature and myth." - Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down Sunshine
"Give Me Everything You Have is a stunning fusion of memoir, travelogue, and compelling literary self-analysis. With the intuitive and psychological panache of Saul Bellow and the mythic intelligence and sweep of Robert Graves, James Lasdun explores the personal and historic qualities of terror and victimhood. The inquisition on anti-Semitism in all its inglorious aspects is both alarming and profound. It's an original, honest, and courageous book." - Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Failure
"This is one of those books that had to be written - for personal reasons on the part of the author, as well as for larger cultural reasons on behalf of the rest of us. James Lasdun's sensitivity to nuance and threat, his commitment to the value of the written word, his awareness of life's ironies, have all been brought to bear on this brilliantly told, painfully gripping story that is at once highly literary and completely true. Its ancestors are Nikolai Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe; its historical moment is precisely now." - Wendy Lesser
"Give Me Everything You Have is an enthralling, complicated book. What begins as a noir thriller of electronic stalking becomes a deep meditation on the ways in which an unwelcome, irrational attraction changes the life of the person who is desired - permanently." - Ellen Ullman, author of By Blood
Joyce Carol Oates
This must be the most informative, the most insightful, and the most beautifully written of any account from the victim's perspective of what has come to be called cyberbullying.
JULY 2013 - AudioFile
There’s no doubt that James Lasdun was stalked by a former student from his creative writing class, but this cyber-stalking looks different from what we traditionally think of as stalking. “Nasreen” writes to Lasdun: “I will ruin you.” She sends him multiple menacing emails daily, sends his colleagues profane messages ostensibly from him, and posts fake reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Robin Sachs, with his gravelly British voice, is perfect for Lasdun’s memoir. Even though Lasdun’s life becomes consumed with saving his reputation, he recounts it all with a level of detachment. (He barely mentions his wife and small children.) Sachs employs a matter-of-fact tone that feels true to Lasdun’s personality. Sachs wisely resists any temptation to overdramatize Nasreen’s mad screeds, but the unhinged nature of the transcripts is clearly apparent. A.B. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
The story of a 30-something college student who employed an array of digital weapons to attack her writing professor, who loved her writing but rejected her amorous advances. In a tale that sometimes seems more like a script for a horror film, novelist and short story writer Lasdun (It's Beginning to Hurt, 2009, etc.) approaches his subject from a variety of perspectives. First, he provides a brisk narrative of the principal events: In the fall of 2003, he was a part-time teacher at a New York college (he changed the name); he greatly encouraged one of his students, an Iranian immigrant he calls Nasreen; after the course was over, they became email correspondents, and he helped her look for an agent and a publisher for her work; when her interest became more romantic, he backed off. And with her continued harassment, his hellish life commenced. Lasdun then pauses, returns to think about the classroom situation and to ask himself what he'd done--or not done--that might have contributed to this grievous misunderstanding. He looks for analogies (and solace) in literary works--among them Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which he summarizes at great length about a third of the way through, Macbeth, Strangers on a Train and Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Penitent. Nasreen's emails grew ever more crude and threatening (the author reproduces many of them), so Lasdun tried the FBI and the NYPD but with no real success. She posted vicious material on Amazon, Facebook and Wikipedia; she wrote to all of his publishers and to the institutions where he'd worked, accusing him of having sex with his students and stealing her material--even engineering her rape. She also forwarded in his name obnoxious and noxious material. A later section deals with Lasdun's explorations of family roots and anti-Semitism. A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age.
