James Polster – författare

Time-traveling alien Pom Trager has used the gullible denizens of Earth as fodder for his practical jokes throughout the ages, with the pyramids, Picasso, and several US presidents among his more modest pranks. Why does he do it? To boost the ratings of The Prankster, his home planet’s most popular reality show.

But when a system snafu lands Trager in the wrong place, he finds himself at the mercy of the very species he’s made into a galactic laughingstock. His only allies are the hapless assistant he just fired and an Earth woman who lends a hand against her better judgment.

With a relentless sheriff hot on their heels, the unlikely trio must drive from Santa Fe to San Francisco within two days. Otherwise their one chance for rescue will vanish—and Trager will be stuck in a backwater world of his own making.

In The Prankster, award-winning author James Polster hilariously skewers our cultural obsession with self-importance and entertainment.

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. (“This is California, man. It doesn’t matter.”) “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.”

When anthropology graduate student Blackwell James returns from a research expedition in the Amazon, he brings home a trunk full of rare hallucinogenic vines…but no research notes. Frustrated by the young man’s lack of progress on his dissertation, Blackwell’s professor finds him a job working on a primate experiment in Los Angeles to spur him along. Trouble is, Blackwell has never set foot in L.A., and he doesn’t know a whit about primates. In fact, for a guy like Blackwell James, venturing into the City of Angels soon proves to be more dangerous than the Amazon ever was. From the moment he is thrust into the bizarre culture of Hollywood, his life becomes a wild, high-octane tale of adventure, suspense, and intrigue. 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.