/lit/ - Literature

I was pleasantly surprised by the Magos book structure. It's basically half short stories and half a full-sized novel, with the novel having ties to basically every previous short stories in some way. I'd like to try writing something like that but I'm not sure if that's a good way to hook readers, since the book assumes you're already familiar with the Eisenhorn series. Maybe it's just a matter of juggling the length of each story so short stories which come and go in a few pages are placed in-between some meatier bits of a few chapters length before the main one. What do you think?