FANTASTIC TALES: Visionary and Everyday.<i> Edited by Italo Calvino</i> .<i> Pantheon: 588 pp., $30</i>

Fantastic fiction reminds us of life’s incongruities. The empty spaces in our homes. The odd looks strangers give us on the street. In many ways, it disputes the empirical assumption that our world of human experience can be mapped, quantified and known. For in the shadowy realm of fantastic fiction, strange half-glimpsed territories are continually opening beneath our feet. And no matter how much we like to think we know, all we really know is nothing.

Fantastic tales suggest that the basic stuff of human nature is not reason but rather an ineluctable perversity. In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, the mask of sanity is something the narrator wears in order to disguise what he’s really thinking. Meanwhile, deep in his brain, he obsessively retreads the same corridors into the muggy bedroom of his master, whom he summarily smothers with a mattress. And in Hawthorne’s brilliant anti-allegory, “Young Goodman Brown,” the world of religious faith proves completely illusory. Though teachers, clergymen and village elders go about their responsible duties each day, once night falls, they journey into the forest to meet smoldering dark men with snakes carved on their walking sticks. In such a world, even a Goodman isn’t necessarily “good.” If only he could distinguish between consciousness and dreams. . . .

Both of the stories above are collected, along with two dozen others, in Italo Calvino’s large, impressive and utterly pleasing anthology “Fantastic Tales,” which was originally published in Italy in 1983 but has just been translated into English. As Calvino argues in his introduction, “What distinguishes ‘fantastic’ narrative is precisely our perplexity in the face of an incredible fact, our indecision in choosing between a rational, realistic explanation and an acceptance of the supernatural.” Fantastic tales remind us that we are all, to some extent, doubtful about the underlying realities of our lives. Even rocket scientists harbor some secret inclination to consult Ouija boards. And even the most ethereal New Agers come down to earth occasionally to worry about mortgage rates and pension plans.

Calvino borrows his basic theoretical model from Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov’s influential 1970 book “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” According to Todorov, fantastic tales operate differently than any other literary genre--realism, romance, science fiction, you name it. This is because fantastic tales never make any affirmative statement about the reality they presume to represent. For example, the ghosts in Henry James’ “The Friends of the Friends” (or even those in his more famous short novel “The Turn of the Screw,” not included here) might be actual ghosts--or something else entirely. Perhaps they’re neurotic manifestations of sexual anxiety. Or even half-truths designed to hide an unreliable narrator’s bad faith.

The point, of course, is that the reader’s range of expectations is never clearly determined by a fantastic tale. The events it describes may be real or unreal. They may be literal or allegorical or, sometimes, even both. It’s no wonder, then, that fantastic tales are of such perennial interest to academics. One can write papers about them forever without reaching any final conclusion whatsoever.

In fantastic tales, the real often seems as absurdly preposterous as the unreal. And in a fictional landscape of doppelgangers and miraculous transformations, people never act that surprised to find themselves breaking apart. In Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Shadow,” a sensitive man sends his darker half off to explore the world of beauty. But when his shadow returns, the master is soon following in its footsteps. And in Gerard de Nerval’s “The Enchanted Hand,” an apprentice tailor sells his hand to a devilish gypsy, at which point the hand takes on a life of its own.

The book’s best story (for my money, anyway) is probably Gogol’s “The Nose.” It concerns a minor bureaucrat who loses sight of the thing he smells with, which, when it suddenly reappears, is being driven around town in a high-class barouche and has already begun mixing in the best social circles. “I am a major, you know,” complains the bereaved Kovalev, “and it’s most improper, in my position, to walk around without a nose. Some old woman selling peeled oranges by Voskresensky bridge might be able to get along without a nose. But for someone who is almost certainly of a high administrative appointment you can judge for yourself, sir.” In fantastic stories, human psychology may be weird. But social life is even weirder.

Calvino, who died too early in 1985 at the age of 62, wrote many terrific tales of his own, and one of the few faults of his anthology is that it doesn’t include any of his own work, such as his hilarious lampoon of government provincials, “The Argentine Ant.” An early adherent of the French Oulipo School of literary production (which was founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais in the 1960s), Calvino believed in applying arbitrary rules to the ways he composed fiction. (His most notorious novel, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” was plotted by randomly turning over Tarot cards.) By limiting one’s choices when constructing words, sentences and paragraphs, an Oulipoean hopes to produce a sort of pure fiction, one that calls attention only to its own immaculate interior machinery. Calvino believed that fiction should not represent reality but create it.

The stories in this collection share Calvino’s elevated regard for story. A good Oulipoean to the end, Calvino applies a few simple rules to their selection, which he outlines in the introduction. Each tale must be complete (there is nothing worse than an anthology of fictional extracts). Only one tale can be taken from each author. And no story can exceed 50 pages in length. Calvino also divides his anthology into two large theoretical sections. The first features “Visionary” literature: stories that explore wide, romantically charged landscapes. The second focuses on what Calvino calls the “Everyday”: stories in which unusual happenings bubble up from the privacy of individual minds. Arranged chronologically, Calvino’s selection of stories moves toward “the gradual interiorization of the supernatural.” In early fantastic texts, strangeness is a force at loose in the world. In more recent ones, it’s a state of mind.

In Jean Lorraine’s “The Holes in the Mask,” an ether-drinker gets lost at a masquerade where garish disguises have replaced the faces behind them. Then, warily, he goes looking for his own reflection. And in “The Very Image,” Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (a major influence on Oscar Wilde and British decadence) recounts how he once stumbled into two remarkably similar places of worship--one devoted to money, the other to death. Both Jan Potocki and Ivan Turgenev tell tales of dreams that are not just dreams. And other authors include the well-known (Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant, Honore de Balzac), the lesser-known but significant (Sheridan Le Fanu and Ambrose Bierce) and at least two relatively unknown writers who deserve attention (Joseph von Eichendorff and Philarete Chasles).

Many of Calvino’s selections are emblematic. E.T.A. Hoffman’s genuinely odd and unpredictable tale of clockwork love, “The Sandman,” inspired Freud’s influential essay “The Uncanny.” And two classic tales of passion-inspiring succubi, Vernon Lee’s “A Lasting Love” and Theophile Gautier’s “The Beautiful Vampire,” with their air of gothic sensuality, have inspired many a bloodsucking contemporary potboiler. (It’s hard to imagine Anne Rice without either of them.)

In the end, Calvino obeys the cardinal rule of anthologists everywhere. Each story he picks is absorbing, unique and continually surprising. In fact, his selections demand more concentration than most modern novels. So don’t read them one after another, but space them a few days apart. They need room to breathe.

It’s impossible to imagine a vigorous and provocative world literature without fantastic tales--or, in this case, “Fantastic Tales.” In our era of hyper-commercialization, when books are so eager to obey the rules of their respective shelf spaces (literature, science fiction, romance and so on) and keep saying the same things over and over again, fantastic fiction continues to elide all convenient generic categories. And as our postmodern age of beeping modems and proliferating commercial images grows stranger and stranger, it may turn out that fantastic fiction has one coherent point to make after all: Sometimes the world may be impossible to believe. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.