— Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Chapters pop in expert jabs, two or three pages at a time. The prose is visceral… invites us to see how bigotry operates in real life."
—The New York Times
"Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America’s longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class."
— Booklist
"One of the bravest, most bracing novels I've read in years.”
— Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
COPPERHEAD
Jessup’s stepfather gave him almost everything good in his life—a sober mother, a sister, a sense of home, and the game of football. But during the years that David John spent in prison for his part in a brutal hate crime, Jessup came to realize that his stepfather is also a source of lethal poison for his family. Now it’s Jessup’s senior year, and all he wants to do is lay low until he can accept one of the football scholarships that will be his ticket out of town.
So when his stepfather is released from prison, Jessup is faced with an impossible choice: condemn the man who saved his family or accept his part in his family’s legacy of bigotry. Before he can choose a side, Jessup will cause a terrible accident and will cover it up—a mistake with the power to ruin them all.
Told with relentless honesty and a ferocious gaze directed at contemporary America’s darkest corners, Copperhead vibrates with the energy released by football tackles and car crashes and asks uncomfortable questions about the price we pay—and the mistakes we’ll repeat—when we live under the weight of a history we’ve yet to reckon with. Alexi Zentner unspools the story of boys who think they’re men, of the entrenched thinking behind a split-second decision, and asks whether hatred, prejudice, and violence can ever be unlearned.
"Excruciatingly honest and exceptionally brave… a beautifully rendered coming of age story… stylistically brilliant, fast-paced, and well-told." —New York Journal of Books
"A propulsive, masterful novel." —Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance, and I Pity the Poor Immigrant
Why I wrote Copperhead
Dear Reader,
When I was growing up, my mother was a prominent local activist fighting against anti-Semitism and racism. She and my father were both clinical social workers, and they had a private practice in an old Victorian next door to our family house. Often, I’d come home from school and find my mom meeting with another activist or an official from the community. My mom was tiny, but she was fierce; I saw her scare the hell out of men three times her size. My dad was just as tough. My parents believed in standing up to bullies and fighting to make sure everybody got a fair shake.
But the year I turned eighteen—after years of threats and menace—my parents’ office was firebombed by a neo-Nazi group. We rebuilt the house and my mother doubled down on her convictions. Then the office was firebombed a second time. No arrests were ever made.
What happened to my family felt extreme back then, but the dog whistle of white supremacy and hatred is a straight-up shout today. With Copperhead, I wanted to look more closely at how our sense of morality both mutates and crystallizes as we come of age. I wanted to explore how hatred can complicate love, how love can make us blind to the danger around us, and how racism and hate are at work even in the lives of those who don’t think they’ve chosen a side.
I’ve been thinking about this story practically my whole life, and the place and time we’re living in propelled me to write it now. Doing so hasn’t brought me much certainty, but it has helped me articulate the questions that have dogged me. Is hatred as complicated as love? What if I had been another boy? What would my life have been like if I’d been raised with a different lodestar? Would I be able to step out from under the haze of bigotry? Who would I be now, as a man? What does it take to be good? And on the road to good, what mistakes will be made, what scars will all of us then bear?
Thank you for reading.
Alexi Zentner
For contact information, including publicity, representation, and booking Alexi for speaking engagements, workshops, or First-Year Experience / Common Read / One Book, One School programs, please go to the contact page.
Purchase
(your local independent bookstore will be happy to order / preorder any of Alexi's books: IndieBound)
USA
IndieBound
Penguin Random House / Viking
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Apple iBooks: Copperhead / The Lobster Kings / Touch
Kobo
Canada
Canadian Independent Bookstores
Amazon.ca
Chapters.Indigo
Apple iBooks Canada: Copperhead / The Lobster Kings / Touch
Kobo
Listen to Alexi talk about Copperhead on NPR's All Things Considered
Selected praise for Copperhead
"Copperhead is a smart, propulsive story about racism, class and the limits of individual possibility… Zentner vividly realizes Jessup's daily world here, from the smell of an approaching snowstorm — "a wet bruise on the air" — to the down and dirty scrimmages of his football games… I can imagine the novel sparking heated discussions in high school English classes, as well as in book groups for the more mature….a pretty unsparing story about how one's fate is determined so much by the random luck of one's family, but it's also merciful enough to leave the exit door of reinvention cracked open."
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Chapters pop in expert jabs, two or three pages at a time. The prose is visceral, as taut as his teenage linebacker protagonist… invites us to see how bigotry operates in real life."
—The New York Times
"Excruciatingly honest and exceptionally brave… a beautifully rendered coming of age story… also stylistically brilliant, fast-paced, and well-told in punchy, deceptively short sentences with verbs that pop them to life nestled in chapters of two and three pages each… It speaks for the excellence and moral realism of the ground work Zentner has laid that Jessup’s decision to try to control the outcome is understandable…the unspooling makes for a riveting story."
—New York Journal of Books
"For all the insight [nonfiction] works offer, an investigation of the question of how bigotry poisons the heart and warps the mind may be better suited to the sophistication and subtlety of the novelist's art. Alexi Zentner's Copperhead is a vivid portrait of what happens to a thoughtful teenager who's forced to face hard questions of right and wrong, and to decide when familial love and loyalty may demand too much."
—Shelf Awareness
“Copperhead is one of the bravest, most bracing novels I've read in years, a story of race in America that pulls no punches. A good kid finds himself in pretty much the worst spot a kid can be, caught amid the competing claims of family, church, justice, conscience, and the love of his young life. Alexi Zentner has delivered a glorious knockout of a novel.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“A deeply personal and unflinching interrogation of the battle between self and history from a writer who never shies from unnerving his readers, Copperhead is an incredibly ambitious undertaking, rendered in sparse, impressionistic prose.”
—Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife and Inland
“Copperhead is a propulsive, masterful novel that begins with the violent game of football and soon plunges into the foundational American violence of race and class, the cold air in which we learn to live.”
—Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance and I Pity the Poor Immigrant
"Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America’s longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class."
—Booklist
“Steely and often gripping . . . Zentner’s portrait of a young man’s conflicting desires for disavowal and belonging is rich and nuanced.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Zentner uses this clash of competing ideologies to fearlessly examine another of America’s seemingly unbridgeable divides: between the country’s predominately rural white underclass and the left-liberal political, academic, and media elites that conservative leaders so nimbly pit them against. The writing and characterization is sharp throughout."
—Quill & Quire