James Polster has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is The Graduate Student.
A Guest in the Jungle
Summary
At 31, Pittsburgh attorney Whitehill rarely has been required to make a decision more stressful than which Brooks Brothers suit to wear to the office. Yet all that changes when a vacation to South America leaves him stranded in the depths of the Amazon jungle. There, he finds himself at the mercy of an opportunistic scientist whose motives are murky at best…and deadly at worst. Though the good doctor offers a variety of excuses as to why he is dragging Whitehill through an actual rainforest - emeralds, valuable plants, insects - Whitehill’s not buying it. He escapes with the help of some hungry vampire bats and falls in with an English-speaking Indian whose tribe is at the heart of a raging conflict with land-hungry developers. Trapped in the jungle, Whitehill must gather what little courage he has to stop an Indian war and preserve a vanishing culture. Along the way, he has a fling with a gorgeous native, narrowly survives being sacrificed to the gods, and is rescued from a bombing by a pair of hard-drinking American expats. Smart, engrossing, and uproariously funny, A Guest in the Jungle is a remarkable novel about the power of one man to make a difference in the world.
©1987 James Polster (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Prankster
Summary
Name’s Pom Trager, galactic superstar and prankster. Never heard of me? How about Picasso? The pyramids? The 1960s? All my doing. Bigfoot. Area 51. The entire US political system. Me. Me. Me! To Pom Trager, humanity’s entire history is one big joke - and he delivers the punchlines, broadcasting hilarious exploits back to his home planet to boost the ratings of his reality show, The Prankster. But when a system malfunction strands Trager in modern-day Santa Fe, his only hope rests in a nebbish assistant he recently fired, a headstrong human woman, and his ability to outrun a relentless sheriff hot on his trail. Now Trager must hightail it to the pickup point in San Francisco, all the while dealing with car thieves, time loops, all-American truck stop food - and a rapidly closing rescue window that could leave him trapped forever in a backwater world of his own making.
©2012 James Polster (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Brown
Summary
Former Boston sportswriter McGee Brown is traveling cross-country with his fiancée when they call it quits somewhere around Nevada. With no job and no girl, Brown pushes on to California, where a fruitless job hunt lands him on his old buddy Fillmore’s doorstep. Fillmore is an accomplished clinical psychologist (and part-time bartender) whose own sanity is questionable at best. So it is only fitting when Fillmore suggests the solution to Brown’s financial woes is for him to become a psychologist as well - albeit, not a licensed one. “Dr. Brown” agrees. His first patient is a beautiful but unhappy woman who suspects her wealthy financier husband is plotting to kill her. Days later, she’s found dead in a gorilla cage, her daughter goes missing, and Brown is hired to find her. The sportswriter-turned-psychologist turns private detective. With the sardonic, oft-inebriated Fillmore at his side, Brown delves headfirst into what the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle praised as “a surreal, picaresque romp through the alienating landscape of contemporary culture.”
©2011 James Polster (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Graduate Student
Summary
For seven months, anthropologist Blackwell James has lived among the Wantayo people of the Amazon, immersing himself in their culture in order to collect data for his dissertation. Trouble is, he hasn’t done much research. Instead, he’s just hung out with the tribe, resulting in some fair skills with a bow and arrow but little else. When Blackwell returns to Columbia University with a trunk full of hallucinogenic vines but no research notes, his frustrated advisor packs him off to Los Angeles to assist a colleague with a primate experiment. But for an East Coaster freshly returned from the jungles of South America, Hollywood is a surreal new world, home to a cutthroat tribe of actors and filmmakers scrambling for money and fame. Caught up in the secret ambitions of his new employers, Blackwell begins a strange trip through the surreal world of movie stars, murder, and money. A secret society, a ghost town, two large chimpanzees, and several shamanistic drug-induced journeys round out this outrageous novel, which features “cameos” by Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Depp, and Steven Spielberg. Gleefully continuing the great literary tradition of comic Hollywood novels, The Graduate Student is an exuberant and riveting ride.
©2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc. (P)2011 James Polster