On April 16, 2012, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer for fiction in 2012. This was, to say the least, surprising and upsetting to any number of people, prominent among them the three fiction jurors, who’d read over three hundred novels and short-story collections, and finally submitted three finalists, each remarkable (or so we believed) in its own way.

The nominees were David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” which was not only unfinished at the time of Wallace’s death but left in disarray, and brilliantly pieced together by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; Denis Johnson’s grim but transcendent “Train Dreams,” set in the American West at the turn of the nineteenth century; and an accomplished first novel, “Swamplandia!,” about an eccentric Southern family, by the alarmingly young writer Karen Russell.

The fiction jury, which changes yearly, puts forward three books to be voted on by the eighteen voting members of the Pulitzer board, who are primarily journalists and academics, and who serve for three-year terms.

The jury does not designate a winner, or even indicate a favorite. The jury provides the board with three equally ranked options. The members of the board can, if they’re unsatisfied with the three nominees, ask the jury for a fourth possibility. No such call was made.

I was one of the jurors for 2012, and am a novelist. The other jurors were Maureen Corrigan, the book critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and a professor of English at Georgetown University, and Susan Larson, the former book editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and host of “The Reading Life” on NPR. (Both Corrigan and Larson have agreed to be portrayed in this article.)

We were, all three of us, shocked by the board’s decision (non-decision), because we were, in fact, thrilled, not only by the books we’d nominated but also by several other books that came within millimetres of the final cut. We never felt as if we were scraping around for books that were passable enough to slap a prize onto. We agreed, by the end of all our reading and discussion, that contemporary American fiction is diverse, inventive, ambitious, and (maybe most important) still a lively, and therefore living, art form.

And yet, no prize at all in 2012.

How did that happen?

The board’s deliberations are sealed. No one outside the board will ever know why they decided to withhold the prize.

I did, however, learn a good deal about how short lists are formed, how “best” books are selected—a process that had hitherto been mysterious to me. Like many, I’ve often greeted the announcement of certain prizewinners with bafflement.

Really? That book? What were those people thinking of?

I can tell you what three people, in 2012, were thinking of.

First, and probably most obvious, the members of any jury are possessed of particular tastes and opinions, and, however they may strive for it, absolute objectivity is impossible. A different Pulitzer jury in 2012 might very well have put forward three different books, one of which might have pleased the Pulitzer board better than ours did.

Still, they could have called.

Utter objectivity, however, is not only impossible when judging literature, it’s not exactly desirable. Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can’t. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite. The cause of the fire should, to some extent, elude the experts sent to investigate.

A proper respect for the mysterious aspects of fiction is encouraged by the Pulitzer’s guidelines, which are gratifyingly loose. The winning book, be it a novel or short-story collection, must have been written by an American, and should, ideally, be in some way about American life.

That’s it.

When we first spoke (we all live in different cities, and met in person only once), in June of 2011, Maureen, Susan, and I made a few fundamental agreements that had, surely, been made by other juries in the past. We would not favor writers for their obscurity (who doesn’t love an undiscovered genius?), or penalize them for their exalted reputations. We would tend to favor the grand, flawed effort over the exquisitely crafted miniature. We preferred visionary explorers to modest gardeners, and declared ourselves willing to forgive certain shortcomings or overreachings in a writer who was clearly attempting to accomplish more than can technically be done using only ink and paper.

Soon after, the books started to arrive.

There would be three hundred of them—culled from the year’s output by America’s wildly various fiction writers—but they came in increments of about thirty. We three were all reading from among the same thirty books at the same time, but not necessarily reading the same book at the same time.

A lot of them, you will not be surprised to hear, were fairly easy to dismiss. They were trivial, or badly written, or lurid, or overblown, or mawkish—the list goes on. Some were delightful, but too slight for a prize of this magnitude.

We each kept a list, however, of any book that seemed even remotely plausible as a contender. When we’d all finished a shipment of hopefuls, we presented our lists of “keepers” to one another and talked about why we’d liked or, on occasion, loved the books on our lists. We made no eliminations. We simply combined our three lists, and went on to the next thirty-plus.

The members of most literary juries, it seems, find themselves to be in almost miraculous agreement during the initial phases of judging. It’s not particularly difficult to agree that certain books have no chance at all and that others have merit. The arguments come later, when some of the variously meritorious books need to be struck from the final list.

My own most dramatic reading experience occurred when, from the third shipment, I pulled Wallace’s “The Pale King.” I confess that I was not a huge fan of his novel “Infinite Jest,” and further confess that I thought, on opening “The Pale King,” that it was a long shot indeed, given that Wallace had not lived to complete it.

I was, as it happened, the first of us to read “The Pale King,” and well before I’d finished it I found myself calling Maureen and Susan and saying, “The first paragraph of the Wallace book is more powerful than any entire book we’ve read so far.”

Consider its opening line: