The articles in this 1996 volume represent the change of direction and branching out witnessed by algebraic geometry in the early 90s.

Preface János Kollár; 1. Fundamental groups of smooth projective varieties Donu Arapura; 2. Vector bundles on curves and generalized theta functions: recent results and open problems Arnaud Beauville; 3. Recent results in higher dimensional birational geometry Alessio Corti; 4. The Schottky problem: an update Olivier Debarre; 5. Spectral covers Ron Donagi; 6. Adjoint linear systems Lawrence Ein; 7. Torelli groups and geometry of moduli spaces of curves Richard M. Hain; 8. Vector bundles and Brill-Noether theory Shigeru Mukai.