Black Light is a voyage of discovery and transformation. Set in Iran, it tells the story of Jamshid, a quiet simple carpet mender, who one day suddenly commits a murder and is forced to flee. With this violent act his old life ends and a strange new existence begins.

Galway Kinnell combines his gift for precise imagery with a storyteller's skill in this journey across the Iranian desert--away from the fragile self-righteous virtues of adopted moral tradition, into the disorder and sexual confusion of agonizing self-knowledge. First published in 1966 by Houghton Mifflin, this...