Opb's State Of Wonder

We’ve got a special show for you this week: it’s 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’s penned four critically acclaimed novels including “Lean on Pete” which won both the Oregon Book Awards’ fiction prize and Reader’s Choice Award in 2011. Hollywood made a movie out of his first book, “The Motel Life.” 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’s Olympian in Portland.11:35 - Cari Luna start