Books in this genre are made up of stories that could happen to real people in real settings. The books do not fall under other categories or genres. They usually take place in the same time period the reader is living (the present), with things that are currently, or could be happening, in the same time period. The contemporary genre also contains informal and conversational dialogue, and sometimes even regional dialects.
Benefits of reading contemporary fiction books
The reason experience is valuable to you as a human being is that it provides you plenty of raw material for pattern-matching and making connections between previously disparate pieces of information. In fact, it's recently been suggested that older people aren't actually slower in their cognitive responses; they simply have a much larger body of experience to search when they're solving a problem. Their seek time has increased.
Fiction represents an infinite collection of raw material for this purpose, because it encompasses situations and ideas that are unbounded by reality and fact. The imagination of the fiction writer serves as your proxy in experiencing the fantastic future, the long-dead past, the inexplicable possibilities. Your own imagination, in turn, is stimulated, and you may make connections you might not have made before.