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b'We\\u2019ve got a special show for you this week: it\\u2019s the Wonder homage to fiction. With the Oregon Book Awards coming up on April 13, we spend the hour with the five finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.

The group is made up of three debut novelists, two poets, and one past winner of the fiction prize. We\'ve talked with three of them before, and we brought the other two into the studio to round out the cohort.

1:20 - Willy Vlautin is as skilled and prolific a polyglot as they come. His band Richmond Fontaine has released 10 studio albums; he\\u2019s penned four critically acclaimed novels including \\u201cLean on Pete\\u201d which won both the Oregon Book Awards\\u2019 fiction prize and Reader\\u2019s Choice Award in 2011. Hollywood made a movie out of his first book, \\u201cThe Motel Life.\\u201d In this conversation he tells us why he continues to write about hard-luck characters in "The Free" and what it is like to write bar songs for his new band, The Delines, who play Thursday, April 16 at Kelly\\u2019s Olympian in Portland.

11:35 - Cari Luna started writing her novel \\u201cThe Revolution of Everyday\\u201d as a Dear John Letter to New York City. She was born there and lived there on and off until 2007, when she just couldn\\u2019t afford to stay any longer. Then, after she moved to Portland and got some distance, the book became a love letter as well. It\\u2019s about a group of squatters in New York City\\u2019s Lower East Side in the \\u201890s.

20:11 - Smith Henderson\'s "Fourth of July Creek" was one of the biggest debuts last summer and made it onto best books lists everywhere from the \\u201cWashington Post\\u201d to \\u201cEntertainment Weekly.\\u201d It was so successful, in fact, that Henderson quit his job, moved to Los Angeles, and has three new novels in the works. In this conversation he talks with Dave Miller on "Think Out Loud."

32:00 - Amy Schutzer began writing poetry as a college student. Since then, she\\u2019s published numerable poems, a chapbook, and now two novels. Her newest, \\u201cSpheres of Disturbance,\\u201d is the kind of book that had the Lambda Literary reviewer weeping openly for the beauty of it and the questions it raised.

41:10 - Since we last talked with poet Lindsay Hill about his wildly ambitious debut novel, \\u201cSea of Hooks,\\u201d the book won the Pen Center USA Fiction Award, was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and made a number of top 10 lists, from \\u201cNew York\\u201d magazine to \\u201cPublishers Weekly\\u201d (in fact, \\u201cPublishers Weekly\\u201d named it the Most Underrated Book of 2013). He tells us about how the book took more than 20 years and five thousand pages to write.'