Alexi Zentner is the award-winning author of two previous novels, The Lobster Kings and Touch. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008, among others. He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York.
Praise for Copperhead
“The chapters pop in expert jabs, two or three pages at a time. The
prose is visceral, as taut as his teenage linebacker protagonist.
Zentner’s concision is powerful. . . . As a moral inquiry,
Copperhead invites us to see how bigotry operates in real
life.”
—The New York Times
“Copperhead is a smart, propulsive story about racism, class,
and the limits of individual possibility . . . 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.”
—NPR Fresh Air
“Ambitious . . . undoubtedly a page-turner.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“Copperhead by Alexi Zentner is excruciatingly honest and
exceptionally brave. . . . A beautifully rendered coming of age
story. . . . The work is 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. A master of voice in the diction of a bright adolescent
football player, Zentner not only captures but nails his
first-person narrator, Jessup, and creates reader empathy quickly.
There are paragraphs, too, of simply gorgeous writing.”
—New York Journal of Books
“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
“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 set in
upstate New York 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
“A slow, gritty coming-of-age story in which class, racial, and
family tensions come to a head in one long weekend.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Steely and often gripping . . . Zentner’s portrait of a young
man’s conflicting desires for disavowal and belonging is rich and
nuanced.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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
“Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America’s
longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class.”
—Booklist
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