An extension of some standard likelihood and variable selection criteria based on procedures of linear regression models under the skew-normal distribution or the skew-tdistribution is developed. This novel class of models provides a useful generalization of symmetrical linear regression models, since the random term distributions cover both symmetric as well as asymmetric and heavy-tailed distributions. A generalized expectation-maximization algorithm is developed for computing thel1penalized estimator. Efficacy of the proposed methodology and algorithm is demonstrated by simulated data.