Most people who are heavy readers don't collect a lot of enormous coffee-table books; why spend twice the money on a book that has a tenth as many words? The only photo book I've known more than one literary-minded person to own is Marc F. Wise's 1995 collection Truck Stop, and it's easy to see why it's the exception to the rule. Wise takes large-scale portraits of long-haul truckers, and he does it with a writer's eye—the details in the background, like a set of homemade Polaroid pornography or a garish painting of Jesus, are ideally placed for a literary eye to discover. They're photos for people who dearly love stories. Each bleary-eyed driver could be the main character of a Carver story or this month's Oates novel. The Regulars is the first photo book since Truck Stop that I've seen with that same literary quality.

Sarah Stolfa worked as a bartender at the small, eccentric McGlinchey's bar in Philadelphia for ten years ("or maybe it was eleven, I can't quite remember. Something about the place swallows time"). Toward the end of her time at the bar, she began taking close-up photos of her regulars as she saw them, from behind the bar. Almost all of her images are framed the same way: fake wood grain and particleboard at the bottom of the shot, the smoky murk of the bar behind her subjects, a beer or shot glass in between Stolfa and her regular, and an ashtray or two at the side. Many of her subjects fiddle nervously with their cigarettes. Most look Stolfa square in the center of the lens, some with a confrontational glare.

But every picture is in and of itself a story. Everyone looks damaged from the bartender's point of view. Consider John J. C. Swarm (that name!), with his penis-shaped head; ultrathin, wispy mustache; and crooked glasses. A stack of brochures peeks out of his suit jacket, tangling with his rumpled tie. Some flat black beer in a greasy glass sits right in front of the ashtray; Stolfa interrupted some work that Swarm was doing with a newspaper and a pen—crossword puzzle or racetrack statistics?—and he doesn't look happy to be bothered. Other photos are just as rich with personality: One man's nose looks as though it was bisected with a knife long ago. A somewhat beautiful woman shuts her eyes, as though she were wishing herself away from McGlinchey's. The stories here are sad and proud and packed with detail; they're incredibly well written, even if the reader has to supply the story.