The Lost Ones (French: Le Dépeupleur, lit. 'The Depopulator') is a short story by Samuel Beckett, who abandoned it in 1966 and completed it in 1970. It was then first published in French and translated into English by the author himself the following year. In dense but spare prose, Beckett describes a small world consisting of a flattened cylinder and its pitiable inhabitants. There is no plot, and Beckett frequently repeats certain phrases and bits of information. He abandoned the story in 1966 because of its "intractable complexities", and the basic idea was reused in Bing (1966, translated as Ping). Beckett wrote, "Bing may be regarded as the result or miniaturization of Le Dépeupleur..." The story comes from a period where Beckett was implementing the architectural theories of Mies van der Rohe and Adolf Loos, who said that "ornament is a crime". This post-How It Is prose is largely fixated on the interior landscape of the mind. As Beckett noted in the typescript for Watt, "the unconscious mind! What a subject for a short story!". Source: Wikipedia (en)