If his new book, “The World Still Melting” (St. Martin’s, $24.95, 265 pages), is representative, Robley Wilson is a seriously neglected figure in American letters. Here is a novel that balances the palette of the Great Plains against the garish colors of the 1980s and comes out with an American farmer that is true to life, made neither absurd nor mythical by the changing landscape.

“The World Still Melting” is a mousetrap of a novel. Wise, bookish Arlene is married to a quiet, intense farmer, Paul. He conspires with his friend Harvey to burn down an old bridge in protest against a proposed bike trail. Meanwhile Harvey’s wife, silly Nancy, carries on an affair with a young Vietnam-veteran rancher named Burton and confides in Arlene. Shots are fired, traps are laid, people are sued, land is bought and sold.

But Mr. Wilson’s classic plot is overlaid with a larger conflict: Innocent, Huck Finn ideals rub up from behind, while the alien manners of lawyers and government representatives loom. The legal system is presented as verbose, effeminate, and nonsensical, in sharp contrast to the farouche men who’d ideally spend their lives contemplating – in all seriousness – the weather.

“Let it pass” is Paul’s typical response to troubling memories. Arlene, who reads Austen and George Eliot, is always seeking a way into “Paul’s language.” More than laconic, he is passive and touchy, and prefers silent accord or oblique symbolism to confession and resolution.

Killed midway through the novel, Paul would become a cowboy monument were it not for the sharpness of Arlene’s mind. She blames Paul for enjoying the underdog role of the small farmer, of sublimating Oedipal anger into land-greed without admitting anything to himself or others. She marvels at “how capricious men apply Justice to their own actions.” The reader will conclude that all the stoic passion of these farmers began with mental grandstanding.

It is in the second half of “The World Still Melting,” where the author leaves Arlene and takes up Nancy’s point of view, that his command of Midwestern language is fully exercised. Nancy has left Harvey, who is in jail anyway, for Burton, and although she is the senior partner in her new marriage by 12 years, she acts like a teenager, can’t think how to spend her days, and does little but contemplate Burton’s sex appeal until their idyll is threatened by various scandals.

Nancy’s mind is idly aphoristic, playing with old nostrums and comforting conceits: “didn’t she have the marks to prove it, to witness the kind of man Harvey was? The unkind of man, they ought to say. … Was God married? … You could be lucky all the days of your life but one, and that one could undo every happy thing you’d ever accomplished.”

Within narrow Nancy, Mr. Wilson find a fascinating epistemology, a mind in thrall to a nightly news morality, but still feisty in its own way. Ultimately an essay on the moral obligation to change with the times, “The World Still Melting” treats the persistence of Midwestern manners with rare, evenhanded perception.

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Massimo Riva’s “Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction” (Yale University Press, 272 pages, $30) is worthy of note for two reasons. One, its abundant quality is obviously the outcome of drawing the best stories and excerpts from three decades of a healthy national literature. Second, for all that range, the anthology presents a cogent impression: that Italy has become a place especially worried about its geographic identity.

Mr. Riva suspects that “Italy may increasingly become a community of immigrants and transients – students, pilgrims, and tourists.” In the story Mr. Riva presents as a prologue, “Consuming the View,” Luigi Malerba imagines a civic crisis in Rome: the tourist view from Gianicolo hill has grown hazy and out of focus. After numerous “panoramologists” fail to solve the problem, a doorman suggests that the view “was being worn away by the continuous gaze of tourists, and if no action were taken, it would soon be entirely used up.”

The influence of Italo Calvino is strong in these stories. Mr. Riva ties the publication of “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” in 1979 to the 1980 publication of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and proposes a subsequent renaissance in Italian fiction in the early 1980s. The Italian mass media was deregulated in 1976, and the ensuing structure of cultural conglomerates – big publishers, prizes, and audiences – hardened into shape around the relatively experimental trend of Calvino.

Hence “Italian Tales,” ostensibly selected from the highbrow mainstream, is quite provocative. Chief among the novelties is “Reaching Dew Point,” a story about a fighter pilot lost in fog. Daniele Dei Giudice tells the story in the second person, lecturing the bewildered pilot on illusory sensations. “Fear is composed of liquids in the act of drying up”: So the pilots ears cease to warn the pilot that he is banking steeply, and about to stall. Mr. Guidice’s imagination is as obsessed with technicalities as Calvino’s baroque “Mr. Palomar,” in which the possibilities of perception drove the storytelling: A man can stand and watch a wave for pages and pages that read like lightning.

But Mr. Giudice’s fog is more distinctly Italian than Calvino’s waves; the pilot musters the courage to tell Air Traffic Control that he is lost, and notes that “Air Traffic Control’s voice was Neapolitan, military, and impassive, seemingly emerging from nowhere.” Even the boundless fog above the Italian peninsula is divided by dialect, indicative of Italy’s odd position, coming so late to nationhood and now plunged to the globalized world of, for example, Air Traffic Control.

In “The Self-Awareness of the Labyrinth,” Giorgio Manganelli makes a tour de force parody of Borgesian eccentricity; in “Zardino” Sebastiano Vassalli zooms in on a rural highway only to find that, as sometimes when squinting, the thing disappears, and an ancient village comes into focus. Even some straight historical fiction abounds here. The legacy of Rome is everywhere in “Italian Tales”; these authors seem to feel they have a special right to consider the Doppler effects of long passing time, and its disruptive effect on the landscape around them.

Because of and despite these special conditions, “Italian Tales,” should be read by American writers, who will be excited to find that little Italy is so far ahead of its time.