Michael Schur’s ‘How to Be Good’ will be published in 2021

“The Good Place” creator Michael Schur would like to help you manage your life even as he figures out how to put it into words.

Simon & Schuster announced that the Emmy-winning writer, producer and actor is working on “How to Be Good: A Definitive Answer for Exactly What to Do, In Every Possible Situation,” in which he combines humor and philosophy to “deal with the large and small ethical challenges we all face every day.”

The book is scheduled for fall 2021.

Besides “The Good Place,” Schur also helped create “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Parks & Recreation” and was a writer and producer for “The Office.”

In a statement, Schur confessed: “I have no idea how to write a book,” but his editor, Eamon Dolan, said it “wouldn’t be a problem.”

Book critics give fiction prize to Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat’s story collection “Everything Inside” has won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. Chanel Miller was awarded in autobiography for “Know My Name,” her book about being sexually assaulted by Stanford University student Brock Turner.

Danticat’s stories — tales of love, family and mortality set partly in her native Haiti — previously won the Story prize for best short fiction. The critics circle praised “Everything Inside” for narratives that have “no forced happy endings, no unearned deliverances.”

For biography, the critics chose Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Josh Levin’s “The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth” won in biography and Morgan Parker’s “Magical Negro” received the poetry award. Saidiya Hartman “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval” was the winner in the criticism category.

Among the finalists for autobiography was Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill,” based on his Pulitzer Prize winning reporting about Harvey Weinstein. The Hollywood producer was sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault.

Sarah M. Broom’s memoir “The Yellow House” received the John Leonard Award for best first book. An honorary award for criticism was given to The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman and the poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye received a lifetime achievement prize.

Publisher cancels plans to release Allen memoir

Woody Allen’s publisher has decided to cancel the planned release of his memoir “Apropos of Nothing.”

The announcement by Hachette Book Group followed days of criticism focused on allegations that Allen sexually abused his daughter Dylan Farrow. Dozens of Hachette employees even staged a walkout.

“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one. At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly,” the publisher announced.

“We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard.”

Allen’s book was scheduled to come out next month.

Allen has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged after two separate investigations in the 1990s. But the allegations have received new attention in the #MeToo era.

Allen’s agreement with Hachette meant that he briefly shared a publisher with one of his biggest detractors, his son Ronan Farrow, whose “Catch and Kill” was released last year by the Hachette division Little, Brown and Co.

“Hachette’s publishing of Woody Allen’s memoir is deeply upsetting to me personally and an utter betrayal of my brother whose brave reporting, capitalized on by Hachette, gave voice to numerous survivors of sexual assault by powerful men,” Dylan Farrow said in a statement.

Ronan Farrow followed up, calling Hachette’s decision “wildly unprofessional.” Both he and his sister complained that the publisher had not reached out to fact check their father’s book.

^ Leslie Marmon Silko wins $100,000 prize

Leslie Marmon Silko, winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, sees universal reach in her writings about her Laguna Pueblo heritage.

“I’m especially proud of asserting the notion that we indigenous people are citizens of the world,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “I’ve tried in my fiction to reflect that we have the same underpinnings, mythologically, that the Greeks and Romans and Scandinavians have given to the culture.”

The academy announced that the 72-year-old Silko is this year’s winner of the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award for “significant contribution” to American literature. A key member of the so-called “Native American Renaissance” that began in the 1960s, she is known for her poems and stories and for such novels as “Ceremony” and “Almanac of the Dead.” She said winning the Walker award encouraged her about the current state of reading.

“It has seemed that literature and books and writing have gone into decline in the digital age,” she said. “I had forgotten that there are people who still love literature, serious literature.”

The Lightfoot award is a biannual prize first given in 2018 to Thomas Pynchon.

The academy awarded prizes to 19 writers overall, 13 of them women. The honors include $10,000 prizes for “exceptional achievement” to Viet Thanh Nguyen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Marie Arana, Sandra Lim and four others. Author and foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni won the $25,000 Blake-Dodd prize for nonfiction, Christine Schutt received the $20,000 Katherine Anne Porter Award for prose writing and Mary Ruefle won the $20,000 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize.

Valeria Luiselli received a $10,000 prize for “a young writer of considerable literary talent” for her novel “Lost Children Archive.” The E.M. Forster Award, a $10,000 honor for an outstanding young writer from Ireland or the United Kingdom, was given to the Belfast poet Stephen Sexton.

The academy is an honor society founded in 1898.

— Herald news services