The gloomy building behind the dying businesses downtown is a place mainstream society finds easy to ignore. When the young man in the third-floor apartment is crushed beneath the weight of profound hopelessness, a chain of events is set in motion revealing the quiet desperation of the building's residents as they navigate their own struggles with love, loss, and the search for meaning in a world that seems to have forgotten them. As their lives intertwine and unravel against a backdrop of poverty and trauma, their landlord Jacob contemplates selling the building, leaving the tenants to face an uncertain future, unsure of where they belong. Told through the shifting perspectives of a diverse cast of downtrodden dreamers, addicts, artists, and criminals, Another Invisible Ghetto is a character-driven exploration of social issues and human connection. It is a chronicle of outsiders and casualties of a failed American dream who find purpose in unexpected places and realize that while they might be easy for the rest of society to ignore, their invisibility could be the superpower that makes them a force to be reckoned with.
Author
Rasmenia Massoud was born just outside of Washington D.C. somewhere during the era of Hunter S. Thompson vs. Nixon, but never lived there. She just happened to be in the area. She grew up in Colorado where she made a living with both blue and white collars at various times in her life before deciding that collars are not good, and that writing stories was very good. In addition to spending several years in various Colorado towns, she has also lived in Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana, England, Paris, and the French countryside; traveling to a number of states and countries in between. All the while, thinking deeply about the places and the people she encounters, and writing things down. She looks for the cracks, the scars under the flesh, gathers them up and molds them into stories in an effort to understand what fascinates, confuses and infuriates her the most: human beings. Rasmenia Massoud is the author of the short story collections HUMAN DETRITUS, BROKEN ABROAD, and YOU DON’T SEE ANY OF THIS. Dozens of her stories have been published online and in print, including The Foundling Review, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Literary Orphans, Sunlight Press, The Molotov Cocktail, Full of Crow, Flash Fiction Offensive, Black Heart Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Big Pulp, and Underground Voices. Her novella, CIRCUITS END, published by Running Wild Press in 2019, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Rasmenia blogs semi-regularly about the awkwardness, frustration and joy of expatriation, food, the craft of writing, and the learning curves that come from being a broken, awkward, and dysfunctional human. She currently lives in southern England with her husband, their loyal chocolate lab and mischievous feline sidekick.
