tHE MANAGEMENT

ABOUT ALCA

Alca was established in the year of 1967, as an organization that defends art and culture. ALCA: Association libre de la culture et des arts.

It was launched by a group of Arab students in Southern France – Marseille, and they are a blend of Marxists, Trotskyists and Anarchists. Later it became a literary café in the city before it was transformed to Paris as a Publishing – House in the year of 1984.

Now Alca is an Arabic Publications, after it had discontinued its work for more than twenty years, and now it’s interested in introducing the most important books to the Arab reader, in cheap prices, especially with the Iraqi novelist “Ali Bader” as its Editor in Chief.

The purpose behind publishing such humanitarian literature is reducing the effect of violence, intolerance and narrow-mindedness in the Arab region. Alca is fully committed to the values of enlightenment and rationality, freedom and independence, justice and equality between the sexes, as well as defending the ethnic, cultural and social minorities.

Alca is committed to avant-garde literature, and its aesthetic experiments, and enlightened writings and everything that displays the different and private nature and character of nations, people and cultures.

Alca is interested in providing third-world literature, Eastern Europe and that which faced Fascism during the thirties. It’s also interested in the pioneer experiments in the sixties, post-colonialism literature, cultural criticism and the literature of Latin America.

Among the authors who had been translated into Arabic, or Alca is in the process of translating their work: Vitaliano Brancati, Georges Bernanos, Bohammel Hrabal, Catherine Burkand, Thomas Mann, Allen Ginsberg, Trotsky, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Slavoj Žižek and others.

Alca is interested in all kinds of modern novels; Literary realism, fantasy and detective fiction. In addition to upscale poetry and poetic experiences of different countries. It provides the reader with a variety of books regarding cultural movements around the globe, like the Hippies, Rock & Roll, pornography and the sexual revolution in Europe.

Alca also publishes two seasonal magazines, one introduces Arabic literature translated into the French language, and the other magazine provides Arabic translations from different languages.

Alca prints and publishes twenty books a year only, “the first Friday during the month of July of every year”. The books will be displayed once and simultaneously in most of the libraries in the Middle-East.

Alca’s motto is; Power within Change.