Author of four highly acclaimed novels, two volumes of short stories, two works of nonfiction, and two published collections of political cartoons, Charles Johnson has produced a wide-ranging body of work. His fiction combines the myths and texts of Asian and African religion, philosophy, and folklore with the canonical writings and mystical counterculture of European civilization. He is often discussed as a practitioner and theoretician of what he calls "a genuinely philosophical black fiction," and he has written key essays and extended philosophical works to develop this tradition. As Jonathan Little has demonstrated in Charles Johnson's Spiritual Imagination (1997), neither the raceless and classless "integrationist poetics" of the 1950s and 1960s limned by Houston Baker, nor the Black Aesthetic articulated by Amiri Baraka in 1975, properly describe Johnson's Hegelian synthesis of African American cultural pride and an American-centered, Buddhist humanism: "Johnson inverts the neat chronology of African American poetics that...