“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.”

In

Zentner, an assistant professor of English who joined Binghamton University’s faculty in 2013, describes his style as mythical realism, an idea related to (but separate from) the tradition of magical realism established in Central and South America.

“I try to work the myth through the fabric of the entire story,” he says. “I’m not interested in using myth or magic as a showy parlor trick. I hope what I’m doing is something new and different.”

The Lobster Kings is new and different on a number of levels. The novel, which pays homage to Shakespeare’s King Lear, centers on the relationship between an aging man and his three daughters, one of whom is named Cordelia. But it’s also an entirely modern tale featuring meth dealers and a female ship captain who hopes to stop them before they wreck her hometown. There’s homicide, a rape, the legacy of a world-famous painter and stormy seas, too.

Publishers Weekly called the novel “brutal and beautiful” and noted that Zentner gets the reader to root for Cordelia early on. “His fusion of myth and mission, fury and beauty, as well as the palpable sense of place in this unique corner of the world add up to a memorable tale,” the review concluded.

Zentner, who was born and raised in Ontario, now lives in Ithaca, N.Y., with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and almost 12. The Lobster Kings unfolds on an island off the coast of Maine. Loosewood Island, just like Zentner himself, is contested territory, both American and Canadian.

Setting the story on an island (and in the near-past of 2005) allowed Zentner to work around technology challenges that all writers face when they write about the present day. “If you set a novel today in Manhattan, you can’t have missed connections,” he says. “You can’t have mistaken identities. It’s almost impossible to write about somebody getting lost.”

Like the community of Sawgamet in Touch, Loosewood Island feels so real that readers may be surprised to hear it’s entirely fictional. In fact, Zentner started working on the book during a writer’s residency in Wyoming.

“It’s easier to write about places you’ve been than places you are,” he says. “You can see more clearly what you’ve left than what you have.”

Zentner wanted the community of Loosewood Island to reflect reality, especially the reality that even in small towns, not everyone’s alike. His fictional fishing village has its tough guys and alcoholics — as well as lesbians, teachers, artists and criminals. Zentner says he tries to do enough research for a project that he knows what he’s talking about but not so much that he’s writing a book report. There’s a risk, he says, of being accurate but boring.

“Nobody’s interested in what the day-in, day-out of lobster fishing is; they’re interested in the idea of it,” Zentner says. “We’re more interested in what it means to be that person than what it actually entails.”

And he didn’t hesitate to put a female character at the heart of the book. “I can’t write women, plural,” Zentner says. “But I can write Cordelia, and I can write women, singular. There is no female voice or male voice, just the voices of individual men and women.

“I have two daughters. I’m really interested in the relationship between daughters and fathers and what it means as a woman to step into a position that’s been male-dominated. My goal wasn’t to make Cordelia anything other than complicated.”

Rosenberg, a professor of English at Binghamton University, says she found inspiration for the book in a real-life drama she heard about more than 30 years ago. A Pittsburgh man sued his cousin for a bone marrow transplant after the would-be donor changed his mind about the procedure. “It was just an instant novel in my head,” Rosenberg recalls. “What would it be like to be the surviving cousin? What would that do to a family?”

Rosenberg wrote to the justice who handled the case. They exchanged letters — this was before the days of e-mail, she notes — and he shared his views on the lawsuit. She even drove to Pittsburgh to discuss the case with him. “He knew that he could not force this person to do good,” Rosenberg says. “The powerful are sometimes powerless. And the seemingly powerless are sometimes powerful.”

Life and other projects got in the way, and Rosenberg shelved plans to write the book. But after her first novel, Home Repair, was published in 2009, Rosenberg’s thoughts returned to the project. “I was at a book club meeting in Binghamton for Home Repair when a book club member suggested to me, ‘What if it were cord blood?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’”

That was just one of the crucial changes Rosenberg made for the novel. In the Pittsburgh case, two male cousins went to court. Her story would have one male cousin and one female cousin. And she decided it would take place in the present day on Long Island, where she spent the first 18 years of her life. “It felt remarkable to me to be able to go home in my fiction,” she says. “This is my hymn to Long Island.”

As Rosenberg describes the importance of place to her story, she refers to Eudora Welty’s views on the subject. It’s one of at least half a dozen references she makes to well-known authors in an hour-long discussion of her writing, moving effortlessly from Welty to J.K. Rowling and back to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The setting, Rosenberg explains, allows her to explore the intense family connections of suburbia, differences in wealth and attitude and even the challenges of driving on Long Island. Indeed, traffic serves as a unifying metaphor in The Laws of Gravity. “There’s always something in your daily life that is an obstacle,” she says. “In Binghamton, it’s the weather. On Long Island, it’s traffic. You have to plan around the traffic.”

Rosenberg finds remarkable texture and vitality on Long Island, and she dismisses the idea that the suburbs are nothing more than a bland string of strip malls, diners and gas stations. Her novel fairly bursts with lively secondary characters: an eccentric aunt, a romantic rabbi and a scheming judge, to name just a few.

“The suburbs get short shrift,” she says. “I grew up in suburbia. It’s full of passion and it’s full of intrigue and suffering and beauty. It’s not as easy as it looks. People are on the verge of wealth or they’re on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re rushing to get to the train on time. There’s a certain kind of energy. Maybe it’s a little dog-eat-dog, but there’s also something that emerges from that energy. There are those surprising moments where the loyalties align in ways that defy gravity. Moments of beauty, of clarity, even of redemption, come out of feeling pressed all the time.”