For the uninitiated: where does YA stop and literary fiction start?

Belmont,welcome to AW ! Take a look at the Stickys at the top of the forum. We have tons of content on this topic.

Hi, BelmontHeir, and welcome to AW.

BelmontHeir:
The YA market has exploded since I was a teenager. Back then what really made an impact on me were books like Bret Easton Ellis' "Less than Zero" and Dennis Cooper's "Closer." The characters in those novels were all 18 years-old or even younger, yet I don't think they would ever be considered YA. I suppose my question is: why?

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With authors like Bret Easton Ellis, it's usually a marketing decision on the part of the publisher but also there are some things that do make a book more likely to appeal to a YA audience than a 'grown up' one, e.g. if a book is particularly fast-paced, has a lot of action etc. Sometimes a well written book will be marketed to both audiences, e.g. Trudy Canavan's Black Magician trilogy is on the YA and 'grown-up' fantasy shelves and there is an increasing trend in YA fiction to take 'grown-up' books that is felt may have a YA appeal and recover them to appeal to the same - see Jane Austen, the Brontes and fantasy writers such as David Eddings.

Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers is also a book that you usually find on the 'grown-up' and YA shelves.

Interestingly, there is a growning number of 'literary' authors who are writing for a YA audience, e.g. Jeanette Winterton (author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit among others) has written 2 or 3 literary fantasy novels for the YA audience (I believe it's because she was inspired by reading and writing for her god daughter). Joanne Harris has written a fantasy called Rune Marks and Nick Hornby (Booker Prize shortlisted author and Oscar nominated screen writer) wrote a YA called Slam.

BelmontHeir:
Is a book YA because the target audience is young people, or because it's ABOUT young people?

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It could be for either reason. A book doesn't have to be written intentionally for a YA audience for a publisher to decide that it would do better on the YA shelves (there was a piece in the NY Times last year about an author who thought they'd written a book for grown-ups, only to find it was going to be published by a YA imprint).

BelmontHeir:
No matter how dark YA novels get, does there have to be something ultimately life-affirming about them for it to be published as YA? I don't necessarily mean a "moral" or lesson to be learned at the end, but some tone or quality that prevents them from being completely nihilistic.

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There is a lot of YA that doesn't end on a nihilistic note, but there are also plenty of dark books out there that leave an ambiguous ending - Like The Red Panda is one example and I just finished reading a book called The Inferior which doesn't have a spectacularly happy ending for the main character but which isn't completely dark either.

MM