This edited collection of chapters, authored by leading experts, provides a complete and essentially self-contained construction of 3-fold and 4-fold klt flips. A large part of the text is a digest of Shokurov's work in the field and a concise, complete and pedagogical proof of the existence of 3-fold flips is presented. The text includes a ten page glossary and is accessible to students and researchers in algebraic geometry.

Arising from a summer school course taught by János Kollár, this book develops the modern theory of rational varieties at a level appropriate for graduate study. Kollár's original course has been developed, with his co-authors, into a state-of-the-art treatment of the classification of algebraic varieties. The authors have included numerous exercises with solutions, which help students reach the stage where they can begin to tackle related contemporary research problems.

One of the main achievements of algebraic geometry over the last 30 years is the work of Mori and others extending minimal models and the Enriques-Kodaira classification to 3-folds. This book, first published in 2000, is an integrated suite of papers centred around applications of Mori theory to birational geometry. Four of the papers (those by Pukhlikov, Fletcher, Corti, and the long joint paper Corti, Pukhlikov and Reid) work out in detail the theory of birational rigidity of Fano 3-folds; these contributions work for the first time with a representative class of Fano varieties, 3-fold hypersurfaces in weighted projective space, and include an attractive introductory treatment and a wealth of detailed computation of special cases.