In “Last Days,” a new collection of 11 stories, Miss Oates displays the uncanny ability to penetrate different states of consciousness, which has always been one of her trump cards as a writer.

In the past, Miss Oates has been our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence. But in this volume there appears a new Joyce Carol Oates I like even better than the hallucinatory chronicler of madness and violence performed on and by children.

Six stories grouped together in this collection under the title “Our Wall” show Miss Oates dealing with the sort of material available to writers traveling around the world in their masks as celebrated personages.

In the last story, also called “Our Wall,” Miss Oates reaches beyond realism to create, in metaphorical terms, the philosophical underpinnings of all walls. History here transcends itself and becomes poetry: “Come closer, have no fear, long before you were born The Wall was, and forever will The Wall endure.”