Winner of the 2018 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature
Released November 1st, 2019 from Schaffner Press
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“An admirably strange and inventive debut novel. Driftless Quintet is about hockey the way End Zone was about football. What the pigskin was for DeLillo, the hockey puck is for Sacksteder: a petri dish full of American paranoia and poison, perfect for measuring our cultures of belligerence, masculinity, sports psychosis, conspiracy theorizing, white supremacy, and empire. Funny, fevered, and unclassifiable, Driftless Quintet perfects the hybrid genre it invents—coming-of-age, small-town conspiracy, postmodern hockey noir—and introduces Sacksteder, like his gumshoe goalie Colton Vogler, as a talent worth scouting.”
Bennett Sims, author of White Dialogues
"As a writer, Joe Sacksteder is always surprising me. With his language, his leaps of faith, his deep and confounding characters. Driftless Quintet is a novel full of these surprises, but it’s so, so much more. It’s thrilling, terrifying and heartwarming and human, a book that will reward multiple readings and ponderings until Sacksteder surprises us again.”
Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Man They Wanted Me To Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making
"Eerie and brilliant, Joe Sacksteder’s Driftless Quintet captures young maleness on the razor edge between cruelty and creativity. This sinister Midwestern wormhole will immerse and surprise you at every turn, from the hockey rink to the end of the world.”
Henry Hoke, author of Genevieves