We consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4-manifold equipped with a "near-symplectic" structure (ie, a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes transversely). Our main result asserts that, up to blowups, every near-symplectic 4-manifold (X, ω) can be decomposed into (a) two symplectic Lefschetz fibrations over discs, and (b) a fibre bundle over S 1 which relates the boundaries of the Lefschetz fibrations to each other via a sequence of fibrewise handle additions taking place in a neighbourhood of the zero set of the 2-form. Conversely, from such a decomposition one can recover a near-symplectic structure.

We identify spaces of half-translation surfaces, equivalently complex curves with quadratic differential, with spaces of stability structures on Fukaya-type categories of punctured surfaces. This is achieved by new methods involving the complete classification of objects in these categories, which are defined in an elementary way. We also introduce a number of tools to deal with surfaces of infinite area, where structures similar to those in cluster algebra appear.

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