Originating from the School on Birational Geometry of Hypersurfaces, this volume focuses on the notion of (stable) rationality of projective varieties and, more specifically, hypersurfaces in projective spaces, and provides a large number of open questions, techniques and spectacular results. The aim of the school was to shed light on this vast area of research by concentrating on two main aspects: (1) Approaches focusing on (stable) rationality using deformation theory and Chow-theoretic tools like decomposition of the diagonal; (2) The connection between K3 surfaces, hyperkahler geometry and cubic fourfolds, which has both a Hodge-theoretic and a homological side. Featuring the beautiful lectures given at the school by Jean-Louis Colliot-Thelene, Daniel Huybrechts, Emanuele Macri, and Claire Voisin, the volume also includes additional notes by Janos Kollar and an appendix by Andreas Hochenegger.

Now back in print, this highly regarded book has been updated to reflect recent advances in the theory of semistable coherent sheaves and their moduli spaces, which include moduli spaces in positive characteristic, moduli spaces of principal bundles and of complexes, Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, derived categories of coherent sheaves, and moduli spaces of sheaves on Calabi-Yau threefolds. The authors review changes in the field since the publication of the original edition in 1997 and point the reader towards further literature. References have been brought up to date and errors removed. Developed from the authors' lectures, this book is ideal as a text for graduate students as well as a valuable resource for any mathematician with a background in algebraic geometry who wants to learn more about Grothendieck's approach.