“The Feast of Steven” by John Rosenwald is either a novel, as the front cover says, or a “cluster of essays,” as the afterword says, or “more precisely a hybrid of poetry, prose fiction, autobiography, social essays, and cultural study.” What you expect going into it will probably color your experience of it. So let me offer some guidance, in case you are interested, as I was, to get a firsthand picture of post-Mao Zedong China.

Background: In the early 2000s I spent a year and a half teaching American literature in China, and the experience was fantastic and bewildering. I’m always fascinated to hear other the stories of Westerners who’ve spent time there. Rosenwald made his first expedition to China as a young professor in the 1980s, and returned often for decades afterward. Along the way, he and his wife bought a farmhouse in Maine, and Rosenwald built a comfortable literary reputation as a teacher, a translator of Chinese poetry and an editor of Beloit Poetry Journal (which eventually shifted operations from its original home at his college in Wisconsin to Maine, where it is now run out of Windham).

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