Complete Review
literary website
Complete Review (stylized complete review) is a literary website founded in March 1999. It is best known for reviews of novels in English translation, in particular drawing attention to otherwise neglected contemporary works from around the world, but there are also reviews of classics, non-fiction, drama and poetry. As of March 2009, on its tenth anniversary, there were a total of 2251 works under review, averaging over 250 new reviews added per year. A blog, Literary Saloon, was added in August 2002.
As of its 10th anniversary in 2009, 95 percent of the reviews were written by the site's founder and managing editor, Michael Orthofer (b. 1964, Austria). From the beginning, it was Orthofer's intention to create an institutionalized persona for the site, and he therefore did not sign his name or even have it anywhere easily visible. However, beginning in 2009 Orthofer, recognizing that he was the majority contributor, announced "posts and reviews will now be signed 'M.A.Orthofer', as I might as well lay claim to (and accept blame for) them."
On founding the site Orthofer said "I’ve always read a lot and been interested in literature, and I was interested in exploring the possibilities of the Internet. It struck me that while there were a lot of sites ... offering book reviews, practically no one was linking to other reviews of the same book, so that’s what I set out to do."
In 2010 Orthofer published a book about the website called The Complete Review: Eleven Years, 2500 Reviews.
The public source identifies “Complete Review” as literary website. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Complete, Review and literary.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q182960. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2009, 2002 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Complete Review” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.