THE SPACE that the novelist Charlotte Mendelson cooks in these days isn’t her ideal. That was her last kitchen. Little potted things crowd even the windowsill by her desk, where she is working on her sixth novel and planning the U.S. launch of her much-lauded last, “The Exhibitionist” (St. Martin’s Press, July 4). She took a break, though, to talk about what she’s currently cooking and growing. Right now, she said, “it’s all about my red Russian kale.”

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