Lately, it feels like you can’t leave your house without hearing someone talk about the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, and with good reason—he’s written one of the strangest and most original books I’ve read in a long time. It’s the kind of project that should be an abject failure—the books seem to violate all storytelling rules—but is somehow hypnotizing instead. This year, Archipelago Books published the second volume of his six-volume book, “My Struggle,” an epic that is at once a novel and a kind of memoir, or at least one that plays with that distinction. In the first volume, “A Death in the Family,” we meet a young Karl Ove—a protagonist who, like the narrator of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” shares his author’s first name—as he negotiates the challenges of adolescence (how to get girls, how to get beer) and the death of his father. In the second volume, “A Man in Love,” Knausgaard depicts marriage with the hyper-real close-up of a Chuck Close photograph. The result is by turns transfixing, ugly, majestic, and powerfully strange. Because the narrative is also about domestic life in all its inglorious mundanity, the reader experiences a strange thrill (and shudder) of recognition. Here is a writer who has captured the paradoxes of modern marriage, in which both partners’ desire to experience intimacy and solitude at different times can become battle lines.

Elena Ferrante tends to be compressed and symbolic where Knausgaard is digressive and flat. An Italian academic who doesn’t make public appearances—apparently no one knows for sure who she is—Ferrante has found a fresh way to explore female psychic terrain. (Her translator is Ann Goldstein, an editor at the magazine.) Ferrante’s novels are usually in the first person; her narrators are women who are at once analytical and highly intelligent—in “The Days of Abandonment,” the narrator is a writer; in “The Lost Daughter,” an academic—but over the course of the book these women give way to a kind of hysteria, overtaken by forces larger than themselves, by emotions that seem almost to change the very nature of their bodies. Amazingly, Ferrante manages to make their slaloming between control and chaos feel natural rather than artificial. Her explorations of motherhood and womanhood have an off-kilter intimacy that seems unnervingly new.

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The mid-twenties are a fraught time for the well-educated American male. There beckons the possibility of retreat, toward the warm communal bath that was college; that this can’t be done hasn’t sunk in yet. In the late nineteen-eighties, David Foster Wallace found himself in a confusing situation and he responded confusedly. He had already published “The Broom of the System,” a sensation. His second work of fiction, “Girl with Curious Hair,” he guessed correctly, would not make the same splash. Wallace had attempted suicide and survived. He drank and got high. He was unstable, unhappy, and uncertain.

So he looked backward: he returned to school in the hopes of becoming an academic philosopher, like his dad, and he asked his old Amherst College roommate and best friend, Mark Costello, to rejoin him.

To wrap up 2013 and to commemorate the outstanding photographic work that emerged this year, I asked a number of photographers to choose one image that particularly affected them over the past twelve months. Their responses cover an incredible range of work, from photographs of Mars captured by a robot to a photograph of a recent issue of a French newspaper with no images at all. Each photographer explained his or her choice; their words are a reminder of photography’s ability to constantly surprise and inspire.

Please note that some of the images contain graphic material.

• May 5, 2013. Dhaka, Bangladesh. An activist tries to take another severely injured activist to the hospital. Photograph by Atish Saha/Demotix/Corbis.
  
  This photo did what I wish my images would do. The intimate and emotional moment made me stop, read more on the situation in Bangladesh, and learn about a situation I knew little about. Seeing one person literally stand for another, without help, made my heart ache. Of all of the protest images we have seen throughout the globe in the past few years, this one made me empathize with the protesters and try to understand their specific point of view.—Andrea Bruce.
• Left: St. Gabriel, Louisiana. Erica Smith. D.O.C. No. 420949. D.O.B. 9/22/81. Sentence: One year. One child. Work: JESP. Right: Angola, Louisiana. Robert Earl (June) Lewis. D.O.C. No. 98335. D.O.B. 9/30/60. P.O.B.: Slidell. Work: Barbershop. Sentence: Life. Photograph by Deborah Luster, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
  
  I settled on an image from Deborah Luster’s “One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana.” I wasn’t familiar with her work until a friend pointed it out to me when I moved to Mississippi last year. I was surprised I hadn’t already discovered her work, as she’s quite prolific. After I looked her up, I saw one of her images in Harper’s and clipped it out. It’s been taped to my wall all year, staring at me as a reminder of what powerful work is. It’s not just the honesty and beauty of the images that struck a chord with me, but the way the work was disseminated and the story behind her motivations. She made portraits of Louisiana’s prison population, asking inmates to present themselves to the camera how they wanted to be seen. The inmates were asked to bring messages, objects, or tools to the photo shoots to help represent themselves. She later gave prints of the images to the inmates, many of whom sent them to family and friends. She says she gave back about twenty-five thousand prints. I just love the idea that these personal images of people who are locked out of sight could allow them to transcend the physical boundaries of the prison cell. What better or more radical use of a photograph could there be?—Carolyn Drake.

• June, 2013. Found photograph of a father and daughter on the wall of the Jesus Malverde Shrine in Culiacan, Sinaloa. Photograph by Jon Lowenstein/NOOR.
  
  Jesus Malverde is known as the patron saint of drug traffickers, or the angel of the poor. When I walked into the shrine of Jesus el Malverde in Culiacan, Sinaloa, I never expected to find this image. Yet plastered on all the walls were vibrant color images in various states of decay that people had taken of themselves and their loved ones. This is one of them.
  
  I’ve followed the migrant trail over many years throughout Central America and Mexico, and across the border into the United States. I have never seen a space where the migration was personified so strongly as on the walls of the Shrine. There were pictures of sick kids, before and after pictures of them wearing Los Angeles Lakers uniforms. There were pictures of family members, of grandfathers and grandchildren, of babies, of dollar bills, and, above all, different aspects of life for people who, for many years, have believed in the Sueno Americano, the American Dream. The way the young girl is holding onto her father, how his face has been slowly erased by the years, hit me hard. The migration and, in particular, the increasing militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border has continued to change the destinies of many Mexican families who have chosen to make their way to the United States. I was blown away by the image and the space, and I spent almost the entire time taking pictures of these found photographs.—Jon Lowenstein
• February 19, 2013. Flea market in downtown Aleppo, Syria. People try to sell personal effects. Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum.
  
  I chose this photograph because of Jerome’s subtle approach to capturing daily life in war-torn Aleppo during the winter of 2013. This year, we have seen hundreds (if not thousands) of still images and videos from the conflict in Syria, but I still find that the pictures I connect to the most are the most subtle, the ones that ask more questions rather than give answers.—Moises Saman
• “#10836—8” from the series “Excerpts from Silver Meadows,” Nazraeli Press. Photograph by Todd Hido.
  
  Desolation and beauty combine to create significant tension in this image. The photograph seems to be a record of some great catastrophe, or perhaps foreshadows the demise of a people and way of life. What could be a foundation that once supported life rests in shadow, while bad weather (or fallout) obscures other details in the image. Out beyond the wreckage of the foreground, a valley exists in a haze of nothingness. That valley seems like a place formed in the nightmares of childhood, or perhaps by the actions of adults. The cloud-covered sun provides some amount of hope in this scene of ruin, but like walking down McCarthy’s “Road,” the place scares the hell out of you.—Danny Wilcox Frazier.
• International Medical Corps facility in the Domiz camp for Syrian refugees, just outside of Dohik, Iraq, on November 22, 2013. Photograph by Ed Kashi/VII.
  
  For me, this image, made in the Domiz refugee camp for Syrians in northern Iraq, just outside of the Kurdish city of Dohuk, represents the trauma and loss of innocence that the young people of Syria are facing. As the civil war drags on with no end in sight, I can only wonder what will happen to Syria’s next generation, innocent and in limbo, their young lives shattered by the acts of men whose innocence left them a long time ago.—Ed Kashi.
• A French newspaper removes all images in support of photographers. (November 14, 2013, issue of Liberation, published to coincide with Paris Photo.) Photograph by Olivier Laurent/British Journal of Photography.
  
  Like lots of readers, I’m inundated by images—online, in print, on TV, on billboards, and so on. Many of the better journalistic pictures from 2013 will rise to the top over time, but nothing reminded me of the immediate importance of the act of making and publishing pictures as when Liberation published this issue. It was the first time in the paper’s thirty-year history that they’ve run without photographs, and I think they made their point perfectly. The words on paper seemed cold and difficult to relate to. The pages lacked depth and believability, qualities usually answered with strong photography. Tragedies and world events lost much of their gravitas, and profiles seemed unfulfilled. The paper felt completely unfinished. It’s a physical reminder of how crucial it is to continue to foster great photography, and, as important, to let it see the light of day.—Ashley Gilbertson.
• Jean, fifty-five, in Ngilima, a.k.a. “The Triangle of Death.” Congo, July 24, 2013. Photograph by Rena Effendi/INSTITUTE for The Sunday Times.
  
  While working on a story in the Democratic Republic of Congo about the traumatic effects of violence against women and children perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army, I met Jean. A shy woman, she stood outside her tiny, bare house made of straw and mud under a pallapa roof. L.R.A. rebels had abducted her and murdered her husband in front of her eyes. One of the commanders ordered her lips to be cut off with a razor. She recounted: “I watched my lips fall on my knees like a donut.” I wanted to make a formal portrait of Jean. I knew her story needed to be told, but I felt uncomfortable posing her, fearing it might become exploitative. But in the middle of the shoot she giggled and asked me: “Are you going to give me the picture? I don’t have any photos of myself, I want one!” She raised a whirlwind of thoughts in my head: Is she ready to face this portrait, will it remind her of her trauma? Or is she so strong that she would not flinch? Did she just want her picture, because it’s normal? Does she have vanity like the rest of us? Jean was calm and able to talk about her horrific events without breaking down. All of a sudden, I was overwhelmed by her toughness and poise.—Rena Effendi.
• The wrapped bodies of two dead people hang from an overpass as three more dead bodies lie on the ground in Saltillo, Mexico, March 8, 2013. Reuters.
  
  For me, pictures like this are so troubling because they ask core questions about the contradictory nature of photography. On the one hand, the photo is a tremendously disturbing representation of evil and chaos. On the other, it is such a perfect and unique example of this evil that it transcends the constant, predictable, numbing pictorial representations of equal or greater violence that usually just slip away unseen. These are such troubling thoughts to think. Ten years ago, I would have felt some of the violence before I could acknowledge my respect for the photograph. Now I feel them both simultaneously. Perhaps that’s the great achievement of the photograph. But what do I know anymore? I guess I’m in too deep.—Peter van Agtmael
• Image from the book “This is Mars,” photographs by NASA/MRO, by Xavier Barral, with texts by Alfred S. McEwen, Francis Rocard, and Nicolas Mangold (Aperture).
  
  There are many works that have impressed me this year and that I found interesting: news images from Syria, the photos distributed by Boston police that showed the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The terrorist attack happened while I was still working on my latest project about Chechnya. Then there was a beautiful installation by Richard Mosse seen at the Venice Biennale and works by Vivianne Sassen shown in Arles, just to mention few. With the myriad of images taken in every corner of the earth and on the most varied occasions, made by professionals and amateurs, to choose from, in the end my choice fell on a picture taken by a robot in a place not yet accessible for a human being. It stands out as a piece of abstract art and, at the same time, as the ultimate example of documentation. These images stirred my reflections on the supposed objectivity of documentary photography (I assume robots have no interpretation) and the role of image-maker.—Davide Monteleone.
• Kabul Afghanistan. November 2002. Seamus Murphy/VII.
  
  I took this picture in 2002, but I found it this year by chance, researching images for a magazine story and a book on Afghan women’s poetry. I was looking for something else and scanned it for the first time this year. I might never have seen it again, which makes it fresh for me.
  
  It was taken in the National Gallery in West Kabul in November, 2002, one year after the Taliban had fled the city in the wake of renewed foreign interest in Afghanistan after 9/11. It was part of an assortment of so-called ‘idolatrous’ art works in the gallery showing the human face that had been damaged by the Taliban. Feeling happy to have found examples of Taliban intolerance, I was anxious, as I posed the gallery-attendant, that the picture would be too contrived. Perhaps that’s one reason the image existed unscanned for years. Interesting how I see the picture differently now.
  
  Like many photographers, I remember clearly the day I took it; what was going on in my life, how I was feeling, what I was looking for, what seemed important to me to photograph at that time. It was late morning and I remember feeling hungry. All of this came tumbling back when I discovered the black-and-white negative and looked at it on a lightbox. Negative. Lightbox. To some, this might sound like another era. But, in addition to everything else it does, any photograph—taken in 2013, yesterday, a minute ago, or a hundred years ago—on the oldest or the latest technology, is inevitably a record of the past.—Seamus Murphy.

• Embrace in Death. Savar Dhaka, Bangladesh. April 24, 2013. Photograph by Taslima Akhter.
  
  This picture, by the Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, from the tragic garment-factory collapse in Dhaka, has been very widely seen and is already in some Best of 2013 selections. But it is an image that really sticks in my mind from this year. Perhaps it’s because I’m a hopeless romantic: a couple’s last moments; the man, shedding a bloodied tear, throwing a protective final embrace around his loved one; her head thrown back in ecstasy-like shock, pain, trauma, dead in his arms.
  
  Perhaps it’s also because I know Taslima and her unusual trajectory to becoming a photographer. Along with the Armenian photographer Karen Mirzoyan, we were the first Magnum Foundation “Human Rights and Photography” fellows when the program started in 2010; Taslima couldn’t get a visa to the U.S. in time, so she went to New York only the following year. We never ended up meeting but have remained in contact on e-mail and Facebook. She had been an activist on garment workers’ rights in her country for a decade or so before she became a photographer. I really admire and respect her wholehearted dedication to the cause, which she documents in her pictures. It’s her life’s work.—Sim Chi Yin.

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“Steel-True,” the massive new biography of Barbara Stanwyck by Victoria Wilson, is volume one of two, and it only takes us through 1940. (Stanwyck lived until 1990.) But Stanwyck was an actress who hit her stride early. The qualities that made her great, that made her, as the film critic Nell Minow says, the most eternally modern of Golden Age actresses, were evident from the beginning. Stanwyck believed in being as natural on screen as the Hollywood glamour machine allowed, and it extended to her appearance: as Wilson makes clear, the actress was not vain. She described herself as just “average nice-looking”—no Greta Garbo or Carole Lombard or Hedy Lamar—and felt it was “a good thing” that she could “crack through with honesty.” She excelled at playing women with their own best interests in mind, tough women with hard shells, but she was also gifted at playing on the edge, where anger and defensiveness part to reveal a glinting vulnerability.

Stanwyck was one of Hollywood’s hard-working pros—a trouper who always knew her own lines, and often everybody else’s as well, was always on time, who learned the names of all the crew. She probably wouldn’t have appreciated a lot of psychologizing about her work, but it seems clear that she drew on her own rough upbringing to play many of her finest roles. Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, she was four when her pregnant mother was killed by a drunk who pushed her off a streetcar. Her bricklayer father soon ran off to Panama, abandoning the family. Young Ruby was raised by a shifting cast of relatives, and supported herself from the age of fourteen as a switchboard operator, a pattern cutter, and a chorus girl. “I’ve known women who plodded through life,” Wilson quotes her saying, “but the women I knew did their plodding on the pavement, not the soil. I know very little about the simple life. I’m a product of crowded places and jammed-up emotions, where right and wrong weren’t always clearly defined and life wasn’t always sweet, but it was life.” That life, with all its ambiguity, is what you always see in a Stanwyck performance, flickering across her uncommonly intelligent face like light dancing on water.

• Dirty Martini, photographed at the Slipper Room, in April, for “Take it Off,” by Joan Acocella.
• Yudi, from the band Revolution, photographed in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, for a Portfolio in the March Style Issue.
• King Krule (Archy Marshall), photographed in New York, in September, for “Heir to the Throne,” by Sasha-Frere Jones.
• A model backstage at the Rag and Bone Spring 2014 fashion show, photographed for a Portfolio in the September Style Issue.
• Claire Danes, in Los Angeles, in July, photographed for “Varieties of Disturbance,” by John Lahr.
• Joyce DiDonato, at the Santa Fe Opera, in August, photographed for “Mastersinger,” by Alex Ross.
• Andrew Bolton, photographed in New York, in February, for “Anarchy Unleashed,” by Calvin Tomkins.
• Michael Bloomberg, photographed at City Hall, in August, for “After Bloomberg,” by Ken Auletta.
• Daphne Fernberger, photographed dancing in Pina Bausch’s “Wind von West,” in December, for Goings on About Town.
• Noah Baumbach, photographed in New York, in April, for “Happiness,” by Ian Parker.
• David Adjaye, photographed in New York, in July, for “A Sense of Place,” by Calvin Tomkins.
• Savages, photographed backstage at the Independent, in San Francisco, in April, for “Terra Cognita,” by Sasha Frere-Jones.
• Ittetsu Nemoto, photographed in Tokyo, in June, for “Last Call,” by Larissa MacFarquhar.

This year, Pari Dukovic became The New Yorker’s staff photographer, a tradition that began with Richard Avedon, in 1992. In 2013, Dukovic photographed a range of subjects for our pages, from politicians to burlesque stars. After his dynamic shoots, which always come with an anecdote, it can be frustrating to only publish one image. So, as the year comes to a close, here are thirteen of Dukovic’s outtakes from 2013.

A visitor from the Commonwealth Realms may be surprised to find that Boxing Day in the United States is not, as it is back home, an occasion to box up goods to donate to the unfortunate. Instead, December 26th is the day when Americans celebrate the box, mostly of the cardboard variety.

Americans observe the day by staying home with their families and staring glassy-eyed at their empty Christmas-present boxes. This is an American form of meditation and, if possible, should not be interrupted. Families do not get dressed or answer the phone, and some put trash bags over their windows and doors so that light cannot enter their homes.

You will notice fewer people on the street, as eighty-eight per cent of Americans celebrate Boxing Day. If you do encounter someone, the traditional greeting is “Happy Boxing Day.” Some citizens have begun saying, “Happy Containers-of-All-Kinds Day,” in an attempt at inclusiveness. Opponents of the new phrase have started an organization called Keep “Box” in Boxing Day, and sometimes chant this in front of the White House. This sort of radical disagreement is typical here. Rest assured that you can travel safely today, without fear of a riot.

At my first post-college job, as an entry-level engineer in the Department of Submarine Screening / Demagnetization, at Leningrad’s Central Naval Electrotechnics Research Institute, I was paid a hundred and twenty rubles a month. In 1979-1981, to the best of my sporadic recollections, and with the aid of some perfunctory and doubtless imprecise online research, with a hundred and twenty rubles in a large Soviet city one could afford:

12,000 boxes of matches (50 matches per box), 1,200 glasses of carbonated water (no fruit syrup) from a street vending machine, 12,000 standard pencils, 12,000 slices of bread at a public cafeteria.

6,000 pay-phone calls.

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