Narrowly edging out a repeat victory for last year’s champion—absolutely nobody—Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son has been handed the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The win is especially meaningful in the wake of the 2012 debacle, wherein the Pulitzer committee was unable to reach a majority agreement that anything was worth the award, not even their last chance to honor the late David Foster Wallace. This time they finally warmed to Johnson’s novel about an orphan’s struggle with life in North Korea. (As in there is too much food to eat, and everyone’s too excited to sleep, we assume.) Johnson edged out his fellow finalists, Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which we assume is just the single sentence fragment “whether she would have been into Justin Bieber,” and therefore you can see why he lost.
Other Pulitzers went to Gilbert King’s Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys And The Dawn of a New America for Non-Fiction; Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced for Drama; Sharon Olds’ “Stag’s Leap” for Poetry; the New York Times for its exposé on Apple and Wal-Mart’s practices overseas; and the Denver Post for its breaking news stories on the Aurora theater shootings. A note to the Pulitzer committee that this article is now eligible for next year.