First on the trivial side: I blink at the inclusion of Twilight in Urban Fantasy, except in the most literal sense that it happens to have some urban fantasy creatures. To me, Twilight is paranormal romance (or as one commenter put it, "abstinence with vampires"), and much more romance than paranormal. Their fandom is proof enough of this. It's almost exclusively female, and the Twilight fans I saw at NEFX last year looked and acted like Muggles who had wandered into Diagon Alley and wondered who all these weird people were. The same, I've heard firsthand, was true of the Twilight fans at SDCC. The clincher: my genre-indifferent, chick lit and teen soap loving teenage daughter loves Twilight.
More generally, we are back at the perennial question of the usefulness of genre definitions (and btw, in defiance of conventional definitions I consider realistic literary fiction to be not "mainstream" as its proponents exist, but one genre among many). I'm glad that Jonathan Strange landed on the "fiction" shelves of bookstores, though I've also seen it in the SF sections. We fantasy fans would have found it anyway, and when it is classed as just "fiction," it may be discovered by many people who wouldn't otherwise read it because they "don't like SF."
Finally, for the pleasure of all of us who know that genre and literary are not mutually exclusive, here's the URL for Ursula K. Le Guin's (speaking of literary writers who write genre) response to a "literary" reviewer who decried Michael Chabon's use of genre: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html
K Stoddard Hayes http://worldbuildingrules.wordpress.com
UF vs Literature: Death Match
More generally, we are back at the perennial question of the usefulness of genre definitions (and btw, in defiance of conventional definitions I consider realistic literary fiction to be not "mainstream" as its proponents exist, but one genre among many). I'm glad that Jonathan Strange landed on the "fiction" shelves of bookstores, though I've also seen it in the SF sections. We fantasy fans would have found it anyway, and when it is classed as just "fiction," it may be discovered by many people who wouldn't otherwise read it because they "don't like SF."
Finally, for the pleasure of all of us who know that genre and literary are not mutually exclusive, here's the URL for Ursula K. Le Guin's (speaking of literary writers who write genre) response to a "literary" reviewer who decried Michael Chabon's use of genre: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html
K Stoddard Hayes
http://worldbuildingrules.wordpress.com