Among my very favorite novels of all time is Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." (The movie's not bad at all, but doesn't compare to the book.) And I really like Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" . . . which, technically, is science fiction, even though I dare you to find it marketed as such. I read the back cover of one of her newer books -- I think it was "The Blind Assassin" -- and the publishers even use the term "science fiction" to describe it. But like "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Blind Assassin" (which I'll get around to reading eventually) has circumvented genre; it is Literature with a capital "L."
Likewise, Jonathan Lethem's back catalogue, containing the hilarious future noir "Gun, With Occasional Music" has been reincarnated as "mainstream" literature, complete with an inscrutably bland new cover illustration (the first was an inspired knock-off of 1940s detective pulp). When this book first came out, no one attempted to disguise the fact that it was a satirical SF; after all, one of the primary characters is a genetically augmented kangaroo. Lethem is one of those authors of the fantastic whose work mysteriously disappears from science fiction shelves, strategically repackaged for those who dismiss SF as so much juvenile escapism.
Kurt Vonnegut's fiction is often explicitly science fiction, yet Vonnegut recoils at the use of the term -- scared off, I suppose, by the books written by Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter-ego. So you won't find Vonnegut in the science fiction department either, even though "The Sirens of Titan" is about flying saucers, "Player Piano" is about the effects of automization in a near-future society, and "Cat's Cradle" is about a lab-created crystal with the capacity to plunge Earth into a permanent Ice Age. These are science fiction themes, whether Vonnegut wishes to admit it or not. And since his books are so readily available, I won't complain. At least I know where to go in the bookstore to find his books -- which is less than I can say about "slipstream" writers like Lethem and Steve Erickson.
Franz Kafka
Where does Franz Kafka fit into this scattered pantheon? His books are located under "Literature" next to those of Dean Koontz, but they're so unique and elusive that they all-but demand a classification of their own. "The Trial" and "The Castle" certainly aren't science fiction (although I think there's a case for Kafka's short-story "In the Penal Colony being borderline SF), but they're certainly not mainstream in any acceptable sense.
Maybe in an alternate universe Kafka took up science fiction. Or maybe, somewhere, there's an unopened crate of never-before-seen SF manuscripts drafted in his characteristic spiky handwriting.
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