Brockmeier wins a PEN award

Kevin Brockmeier has won PEN USA’s 2007 Literary Award for fiction for his chilling novel “The Brief History of the Dead,” about the end of human life on Earth.

The writers’ group bestowed its nonfiction awards on Debra Marquart, for “The Horizontal World,” and Lawrence Wright, for “The Looming Tower.”

They and winners in seven other categories will be honored at a dinner Nov. 6 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, along with novelist and screenwriter Clancy Sigal, who is receiving the group’s lifetime achievement award.