“It’s a book I’ve been trying to figure out how to write my entire life,” he says.

Zentner, 45, grew up Jewish, the son of social workers who fought anti-Semitism and racism. The year he was 18, white supremacists firebombed their office in Ontario, Canada. His parents rebuilt the office, right next door to their home, and a year later it was attacked again. No one was ever charged with the crimes.

Copperhead opens with a note to readers that explains some of this background. “I’m generally a private person,” Zentner says. “But I think it’s important to know that there’s a context to writing this. This isn’t just a reaction to what’s happening today.”

Anti-Semitism and racism are on the rise, he says, but when in history were they ever not an issue? The key question as he sees it is: Why would anyone hate someone else for no reason?

Zentner, author of two other acclaimed works of literary fiction, also writes horror novels under the pen name Ezekiel Boone. Although some of those books deal with a plague of man-eating spiders, writing Copperhead was far scarier.

“A book like this, if I got it wrong, it would be wrong in a spectacular and unpleasant way,” says Zentner, noting he’s a straight white man taking on difficult questions related to race and racism. “What makes it scary is what makes it essential.”

He says he decided he had to risk being wrong rather than risk saying nothing about racism. “If we don’t talk about it in a real way, nothing’s ever going to get better,” he says. “This is a way to open a conversation.”

Copperhead centers on Jessup, a high school senior who comes from an infamous family in a small upstate New York town. His stepfather and half-brother are white supremacists who went to prison after beating two young black men to death. A talented football player with good grades and a black girlfriend, Jessup has tried to put some distance between himself and his family’s church, where members seem eager to fight a so-called racial holy war. He hopes college will be his ticket to a fresh start somewhere far from home.

Why create a protagonist like that? “The truth of the matter is that the bad guys are never as interesting as heroes who are flawed,” Zentner says. “What does it mean to be saddled with that family history? Can you escape it?”

Zentner describes Cortaca, the fictional setting for the book, as a through-the-looking-glass version of Ithaca, where he lives with his wife and their two teenage daughters. In Cortaca, there’s a town-gown divide as well as a white collar-working class divide. There’s also just one high school and thus no easy way for Jessup to start over.

It’s a made-up setting that offers Zentner the freedom to do what’s best for the story. “Fiction is beholden to the truth, not to the facts,” he says.

Copperhead is his attempt to give to readers some of the energy and challenging conversations that students find in his creative writing classes.

“Fiction talks about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human,” says Zentner, who joined Binghamton University’s faculty as an assistant professor of English in 2013. He wants his classroom to be a place where people can talk about things that really matter.

“One of the first things we can ask ourselves if we want to be progressive is: How do we progress?”

Zentner says that means acknowledging our mistakes and being willing to listen. The impulse is to say, “It’s not my fault,” he notes, rather than “How can I do better going forward?”

Zentner admits that nuanced arguments for diversity are hard to sell, much harder than fear. It’s easier to pick up the blunt sword of bigotry than to tease apart systemic problems embedded in our democracy and economy. Still, race, class, gender and sexuality are frequent topics in his classroom and with his friends outside the academy.

“I think of social justice as a language,” Zentner says. “If you were born before 1985, you’re probably not a native speaker. We need to remember that.”

Nobody should get a free pass, he adds, but we need to work at learning that language.

“Complicated conversations can quickly outpace your knowledge,” he says. “That’s true for tax law or home repair, and it’s certainly true when we talk about diversity.”

Zentner’s books

Copperhead, to be published July 9 by Penguin Random House, is the latest novel by Binghamton University author Alexi Zentner. Booklist says: “Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America’s longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class.”

Zentner, author of The Lobster Kings and Touch, also writes horror novels under the pen name Ezekiel Boone.

Beauty and Attention (Lake Union Publishing, 2016) unfolds in the 1950s as a recently orphaned young woman from Rochester, N.Y., goes to Europe to renew family connections. Libby Archer’s friends expect her to marry her hometown beau, but she seems to long for a grander adventure of some kind. Instead, Libby inherits a large fortune, falls victim to a scheming older woman and ends up married to a casually cruel man who has a young daughter of his own.

“The essence of the original novel is that a woman’s only choice is her choice of a spouse,” Rosenberg says. “And I tried to think of another time where that was largely true. … I could have done a more feminist take, but what I wanted to do was see what would happen if you took that cage and put it around someone. I wasn’t so interested in deconstructing the cage as I was in thinking what that cage would feel like in the 20th century. And by doing that, trying to think about how it may still feel for some women who don’t feel that they have the freedom of choice they need and deserve.”

Rosenberg says she has loved The Portrait of a Lady for years. She had a long-running debate with her late husband John Gardner and English department colleagues Bill Spanos and Susan Strehle about whether the original book had a happy ending. Decades ago, she even worked the story into a screenplay. The producer who was interested suggested that she modernize the script. And while she initially dismissed the idea, she eventually came to see it as an avenue to revisit a beloved story.

“I love Henry James and I think especially here he creates an incredible cast of complex characters,” Rosenberg says. “What happens when you’re given freedom in an extraordinary and unexpected way, and then you make poor choices with that freedom? That dilemma really interests me.”

In Beauty and Attention, Rosenberg keeps the basic structure of James’ plot while switching the locations as well as the time in which it’s set. Rosenberg, who lived in Northern Ireland for six months as a Fulbright scholar several years ago, takes the story to Northern Ireland (vs. England), Rome (rather than Florence) and Rochester (vs. Albany).

The new work has a distinctly cinematic feel, thanks in part to the attention Rosenberg devotes to details of fashion. Dresses with telescoped waists, a black Chanel suit, Moondrops lipstick and Bermuda plaids all take their turn on the page.

Rosenberg does tweak the storyline to make Libby’s situation more difficult and to create a compelling reason that she stays in a miserable marriage for as long as she does. Secondary characters also morph quite a bit in the update. Libby’s chronically ill cousin, Lazarus Sachs, and her best friend, journalist Henrietta Capone, are more modern creatures than could’ve existed in James’ story.

The ending of the original novel is famously ambiguous. Rosenberg thinks James’ heroine will eventually be all right, even if she’s done with love, but she worked hard to leave her own cast of characters in an undefined state. “I wish I had left it even more open-ended,” Rosenberg says. “I wish I had kicked the door open even farther. Maybe next time!”

As a novelist and a poet, she says, she’s always rethinking the choices she has made in her work. This project gave her an opportunity to consider other modern retellings of classic books. The Innocents by Francesca Segal, an update of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, is an example of a well-constructed retelling, she says. The Hours by Michael Cunningham isn’t a straight retelling of Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but it also succeeds in bringing a new view to a familiar book.

As a professor of English, Rosenberg is especially steeped in the study of literature. “I do love the 19th century novel,” she says. “I think the form reached its apex there. Forms reach a kind of perfection. You have great writers like Dostoyevsky and Dickens and Austen, and they do every beautiful thing that can be done. Other people can mess with it, but we’re probably all waiting for the next great form. I don’t think stories ever die, but they take new forms.”