The finalists for the 2016 Thurber Prize for American Humor, sponsored by Thurber House, are:
Jason Gay, author of Little Victories: A Sportswriter's Notes on Winning at Life (Anchor)
Harrison Scott Key, author of The World's Largest Man: A Memoir (Harper)
Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton)
The award will be presented at a ceremony in New York City on September 26.
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Winners were announced for this year's PEN Center USA Awards, which recognize the best writing in the western U.S. The winning writers in each category receive $1,000 and will be honored September 28 at the Literary Awards Festival in Beverly Hills, Calif. The 2015 PEN Center USA Award winners are:
Fiction: See How Small by Scott Blackwood (Little, Brown)
Creative nonfiction: A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros (Knopf)
YA/children's: The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsberg (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Poetry: Reconnaissance by Carl Phillips (FSG)
Graphic literature innovator: Gene Luen Yang
Research nonfiction: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau)
Translation: Stephen Kessler for Forbidden Pleasures: New Selected Poems by Luis Cernuda (Black Widow Press)
Drama: Landless by Larissa FastHorse
Journalism: T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong for "An Unbelievable Story of Rape" (ProPublica and The Marshall Project)
Teleplay: John Logan for Penny Dreadful, "A Blade of Grass"
For the first time in the 26-year history of the awards, PEN Center USA unveiled the screenplay finalists. The nominees are Oliver Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald for Snowden; Tom Ford for Nocturnal Animals; Damien Chazelle for La La Land; and Jeff Nichols for Loving.
As was announced earlier, Isabel Allende will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and Jason Rezaian will be honored with the Freedom to Write Award. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan will be at the ceremony as well to present Willow Bay and the USC Annenberg School of Journalism with PEN's Award of Honor.