Simon/e van Saarloos
Playing Monogamy

Co-presented by Publication Studio Rotterdam and Publication Studio Vancouver.

Love is love, but not really. To recognize love as love we need comprehensible images. What are those contemporary images that help us identify love and how could we identify love differently, figuring it as less defined by safety procedures, measured commitment and feelings of ownership and entitlement? Playing Monogamy refuses to see personal relationships as safe havens where people can hide from the precarities of society, and instead proposes to make public life more intimate and romantic.

Through a contemporary rereading of the cult of monogamy, van Saarloos play- fully queers the way in which the structure of monogamy is upheld through social convention within Western contexts. Written for more of a lay audience, the book proposes an expanded and polyamorous engagement with intimacy and sexuality as a possible alternative. Originally written in Dutch and published by De Bezige Bij, Publication Studio is excited to bring this book to an English-speaking audience for the very first time. We are also happy to share that this edition of the book, translated by Liz Waters, will include a preface by Leni Zumas, author of the US bestseller Red Clocks.

Simon(e) van Saarloos (1990, Summit, New Jersey) is a writer, philosopher and performer living between Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Brooklyn, New York City. She has published several books in Dutch including Ik deug / deug niet (a collection of columns originally published in the Dutch national news- paper NRC), De vrouw die (a novel about a molecular biologist running the NYC marathon in a burqa) and Enz. Het Wildersproces (a feminist and queer report of the trial against the Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders). Her forthcoming book, titled Herdenken herdacht, is a non-fiction work about queer forgetfulness, white erasure and embodied commemoration. Simon(e) also writes and performs theatre and regularly appears on stage as a lecturer and interviewer. Currently, she is an MA student at the Dutch Art Institute. Her recent artist residencies include the Deltaworkers in New Orleans, Lousiana, and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft.

Publication Studio (founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2009) prints and binds books one at a time on-demand, creating original work with artists and writers we admire. Working within an international network of eleven sister studios—who together share in the weight of global distribution—we use any means possible to help writers and artists reach a public: physical books, an online library, eBooks and unique social events with our writers and artists in many cities.

READ Books respectfully acknowledges that it is situated on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.