“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.”

“In terms of publishing, my goal was always to reach as many readers as possible,” says Rosenberg, a Binghamton University author who found her moment on the best-seller list surreal. “I think that e-books have allowed access to books for people who can’t afford $30 for a hardcover. I love it that books are more affordable now.”

The Moonlight Palace, from Lake Union Publishing, was released in October. Thanks in part to a special “Kindle First” promotion and a 20-city virtual book tour, it has already reached a wide audience — more than 100,000 readers in the first month of pre-publication.

The book, set in 1920s-era Singapore, is a departure for Rosenberg, better known for two novels set in modern New York state as well as poetry and children’s books. Inspiration struck when she visited Singapore a few years ago and heard about a palace that had been allowed to fall into disrepair. “I found myself thinking ‘What would it be like to be the last member of that family, living in a house you know is falling?’” she recalls. “And then this 17-year-old girl came into my life!”

That teenager blossomed in Rosenberg’s imagination into independent-minded Agnes Hussein, who is determined to find a way to save the crumbling Kampong Glam Palace. The coming-of-age story traces the orphan’s adventures in romance and finance, while providing lots of colorful detail about life, politics and culture in Singapore nearly a century ago.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the 1920s as this time of enormous change,” Rosenberg says. “In a way, it’s a very forward-thinking time. There’s a lot of chaos and confusion; it’s very modern. There are all kinds of new freedoms coming about.”

Rosenberg says she knew only a few bare-bones details about the historical family that owned the palace. In fact, she didn’t want to know too much! “It would’ve hampered my ability to invent,” she says. “There’s something l love about working with fiction but being able to touch base with reality. It’s a springboard. It seems to give a new lift, in the sense of energy and height, to your ability to leap away.”

The novel references the Communist movement of the 1920s as well as elevators, cars, jewelry, the flu pandemic and newspaper journalism. “It’s a book about empire,” Rosenberg says. “The story of Singapore is the story of a country that was literally bought and paid for.”

Rosenberg delights as always in her minor characters, including a would-be terrorist, colorful businessmen, a sharp-eyed editor and Agnes’ multicultural extended family. There’s also a British villain and an American hero.

“I have always said, ‘Write the book you want to read,’” Rosenberg says. “I owed my readers a non-tragedy after The Laws of Gravity. I knew I didn’t want it to be sugary, but I did want it to have a lightness and sparkle to it.”

Rosenberg says she writes for insomniacs and people in scary doctors’ waiting rooms. “I want to write the kind of books that will keep people company, in the deepest sense,” she says. “Books have saved me in those situations. I owe a serious debt.”

“I feel like I’m maintaining a community, a place where people can come and talk about the puzzle,” Sharp says.

His readers include at least a few celebrities, notably actress Dana Delany, who recently mentioned the blog on Jimmy Kimmel Live; Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten and food writer Ruth Reichl. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, reads the blog and occasionally leaves a comment.

The blog has been joined by a Facebook page and Twitter account, where Sharp riffs on matters only tangentially related to crosswords and his other passion, pulp fiction.

“I prefer the Facebook page as a place to hang out and chat,” he says. “People have conversations and they love each other, and I could practically not exist. There’s opportunity for back and forth, maybe because I only have about 1,400 Facebook fans. Compared to 20,000 readers a day, it’s a smaller group. I feel like I can actually talk to people in a way I can’t on the blog. … At this point, it’s a more intimate space.”

Scroll through the comments and you’ll find readers sharing their favorite words, news of places and people with unusual names and discussions of pop-culture references to crosswords. Of course, there are plenty of threads full of outrage over misspellings or poor grammar.

Sharp works on the blog, which he began five years ago, for an hour or two each day. It might take some people that long just to complete the puzzle, but he can do even the toughest ones in 10 or 15 minutes. (A typical Monday puzzle, the easiest of the week, might be a three-minute challenge for him.) While Sharp says speed isn’t his primary goal, he placed 31st overall and 10th in his division at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2011. He received a small trophy for being second-fastest in New York state, though he’s quick to note that the category excluded New York City.

“I usually solve it online on The New York Times website proper, which means my time comes up against everyone else’s,” Sharp says. “It used to stress me out because I was being timed and ranked against other solvers. That doesn’t stress me out anymore.”

In 2010, Sharp took on the challenge of constructing original puzzles for the first time. Since then, he’s had a few in The New York Times, one in The Wall Street Journal and a couple in the Los Angeles Times.

“Sometimes I get an idea and it’s done in three or four hours,” Sharp says. “Others take longer to percolate. They pay very little, but it is satisfying to see them and to have people doing them. It’s good validation. If you get it into The New York Times, a lot of people will do it. That kind of audience is nice to have if you’re going to put the time in.”

The notion of readership — for the blog, for his puzzles, for his scholarly work — is one Sharp wrestles with regularly. When he joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1999, a more conventional academic career seemed to lie ahead. Life as Rex Parker, which includes a second blog, Pop Sensation, devoted to Sharp’s collection of vintage paperbacks, has taken him off that course.

“More people read me in a single day than ever read everything I ever wrote over all time,” he says. “If you take all the articles I wrote, add my dissertation and anything I had written on paper up to the time I started my blog, today in one day more people read what I have written. That’s not to say that what I write today is more substantive, but having that kind of audience — and it didn’t fall in my lap, it was built over time — it’s not nothing.”

Sharp still teaches Medieval, Renaissance and Arthurian literature, and he does see ways in which the blogs inform that work. “I hope in some way that my approach to teaching is what I do in my own writing,” he says. “You need to be serious about your writing and dot your I’s and cross your T’s. On the other hand, you need to not be bound by conventions and what’s safe, what’s established. There are a lot of reasons, not least of which is that you will be bored. And if you are bored, your readers are going to be bored. You need to take some risks. I try to encourage people to be both serious about their work and daring in terms of how they express it.”

Sharp’s pop-culture expertise has begun to find an academic forum. He gave a keynote address titled “Lurid Liberation: Sex and Social Change in American Paperback Cover Art, 1940-1970” as part of a conference for the 75th anniversary of Hofstra University’s library. The hour-long talk was, he says, designed to be both entertaining and instructive.

“It was utterly unexpected because I’ve never done anything academic related to it except for my paperback blog,” Sharp says. “On the one hand, that’s not an academic endeavor; on the other hand, it’s completely an academic endeavor. It’s all about collecting and sorting and learning about the history of the art. I talk about it in irreverent ways, but I’m also lovingly amassing this collection of an important time in American commercial art that’s not well documented anywhere else. So in some ways my interests and my whole approach are academic. I’m showcasing something that would be invisible otherwise, and that’s really what a lot of scholars do. That loving attention to detail and that respect for books as artifacts, all that’s going into my Pop Sensation blog.”

For now, Sharp says he enjoys keeping up with the blogs and teaching literature. The blogs have allowed him to make new contacts, find a voice that’s different from his scholarly writing and experiment with developing an audience. Eventually, though, he expects to take a step back from the blogs to give himself a chance to consider what else he might like to write. He has some ideas for a book, but isn’t drawn to writing about the history of puzzles or anything so obvious. Sharp says he believes the blog has given him the freedom to do something more creative. “You never could have convinced anyone that there was going to be an audience for a daily blog about The New York Times Crossword,” he says. “It would not have seemed like a good idea. It grew because I kept at it and I care about it.”

Sharp says he would like to see greater acceptance of new media and popular forms of writing in the academy. The idea of the monograph as the gold standard for tenure feels dated, he says, and the humanities would benefit if more scholars interacted with the public.

“There’s something to be said for a professor reaching an audience that isn’t scholarly,” he says. “That’s a valuable role for the university. I couldn’t write what I write if I didn’t have the education I have, even though I’m not writing scholarly analysis of Medieval poetry anymore. Everything that went into doing that informs what I do now.”

“My research is about what happens to the ideal as the Empire declines because it is so tied to the Empire,” said Gopinath, an assistant professor in Binghamton University’s English Department. “What happens to that ideal, which was an embodiment of the imperial nation, in the second half of the 20th century?”

It’s a question she answers in her book “Scarecrows of Chivalry: The Literature of English Masculinities after Empire.”

She’s working on revisions now after completing the writing during a 2010 fellowship from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Gopinath is interested in the idea of the British gentleman — the well-mannered, leadership-driven “good Englishman” — who was turned out by boarding schools with a certain set of traits to be used to rule the country and the Empire. These traits, her work, points out, only emerged in hierarchical relation to those considered inferior: the colonized, the working class and women.

The subject first attracted her attention when she read P.G. Wodehouse novels as a teenager. “They were comedic, entertaining novels about the upper-crust of England, full of style and wit. But still, no one talked about the Empire, or how and where Wodehouse’s silly rich gentlemen were getting their money or how they got away with being such idiots,” she said. “I always went back to the moment of reading.”

Her research interests have led to papers on diverse topics, from James Bond to George Orwell. She has also covered case studies of modern-day representations of the “likeable” Englishman, like actor Hugh Grant in his many romantic comedies. In her other projects, she considers the fluidity of masculinity in Hindi (Bollywood) film, and the construction of masculinities during the Northern Irish “Troubles.”