News of note for readers: July 8, 2026

Catch up quick with the bookish news of the past few days ... or take a deeper dive into each story. Your choice!  

• Shahrnush Parsipur, an Iranian author whose feminist fiction caused her to be imprisoned multiple times, died July 3 at age eighty (The Guardian).

• Staff members at Hachette Book Group voted to unionize on Tuesday (The New York Times). 

• Bad Girl Books, the UK's first romantasy bookshop, has opened in Oxford (The Guardian).

• Hannah Grace, the bestselling author of Icebreaker, will release the Formula 1-themed romance novel Champagne Problems on February 16 (People).