Adam Smith has written the worst treastises ever on free market economics. Murray Rothbard has gone as far to call him a plagiarist. I simply find him unoriginal and uninteresting; Richard Cantillon and the French classical liberals like Say, Turgot, and Bastiat, have by themselves contributed far more to economic advance than Adam Smith has with his "invisible hand". I do not like describing concrete truths in mystical terms, and it's a very poor metaphor to begin with, but I digress. That is neither here nor there.
I suppose it depends on what aspects of economics you're interested in. Be it prices and costs, business cycles, capital and interest, taxation, history, methodology, or what have you. Some /recent/ authors I can recommend looking into are Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and George Reisman. The Mises Institute regularly features articles from men like these and many others. Here is a recent article published by Reisman: http://mises.org/story/3330
Caution Wake Turbulence