The 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners were just announced, and there were two major surprises in the bunch. First, David Wood of The Huffington Post took home the company’s first-ever award for national reporting for his “riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war,” in his Beyond the Battlefield series, beating out reporters from traditional media outlets like the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal. Kind of surprising, right?

But it gets more shocking. You’re never going to believe who nabbed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. No one. As Sarah Weinmann points out, the last time the Pulitzers failed to award a prize in fiction was back in 1977, when the board vetoed the jury’s selection: A River Runs Through It. And it’s not as if there was a shortage of excellent options among this year’s finalists — while we would have been thrilled to see Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! score such a big honor, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, are certainly nothing to sneeze at. Click through to check out the full list of winners in the Journalism and Letters, Drama, and Music sections, and let us know in the comments if you think the fiction jurors — Susan Larson, Maureen Corrigan, and Michael Cunningham — have some serious explaining to do. … Read More